The Coffee Trader is a suspenseful historical novel about a commodities trader in 1659 Amsterdam who hatches a bold scheme to corner the fledgling coffee market. Miguel Lienzo, a Portuguese Jew who fled to Amsterdam to escape the Inquisition, is a trader on the Exchange. When he sees an opportunity to build his fortune by controlling the coffee market, he can’t resist, despite the many risks.
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Lawrence Sanders’s Edward X. Delaney series comprises five great detective thrillers set in New York City from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. Books 2 through 5 are the “Deadly Sins” novels. Suspenseful, well-written, and insightful, all five books are a pleasure to read.
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‘The Various Flavors of Coffee’ by Anthony Capella is a captivating historical novel that follows the life and loves of Robert Wallis, a bohemian would-be poet whose life is dramatically changed by a cup of coffee. One morning at the Café Royal in London in 1896, a coffee merchant overhears Wallis’s remark that his coffee is “rusty” and offers him a job to help develop a standard “vocabulary of coffee.” Accepting the challenge, Wallis embarks on a journey in the coffee trade that will transform his life.
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Coffee quotations from classic literary works, including novels, poetry, and more, are a testament to coffee’s longstanding popularity and to the enduring link between reading and coffee. This article highlights a small sample of favorite coffee quotations from classic works of literature.
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This collection of short stories represents some of Faulkner’s first published prose pieces. Faulkner wrote the stories while he was living in New Orleans in 1924 and 1925 and most were published there. Only a few hold up on their own, but the book is worth reading to see an early glimmer of Faulkner’s talent.
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Graham Greene’s book The Quiet American is a gripping story about murder, love, and war, set in Vietnam during the last days of the French occupation and the beginning of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Beautifully written, the book explores the basic existential question of what it means to be human.
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