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THE VARIOUS FLAVORS OF COFFEE

Despite its length, a fast-paced narrative propelled by Capella’s masterful characterizations of his principals, Wallis and...

A coffee-taster in fin de siècle London experiments with love, coffee varietals and the commodities market in Capella’s robust latest (The Wedding Officer, 2007, etc.).

Robert Wallis is a dandified dilettante who pens verse, spouts aphorisms and aperçus and spends beyond his meager allowance on smoking jackets and other wardrobe items worthy of his idol (at least sartorially) Oscar Wilde. Coffee importer Samuel Pinker overhears Wallis disparaging a café’s brew, and hires his palate. Collaborating with Pinker’s daughter Emily, Wallis concocts a tasting kit of small vials of coffee flavors, enabling Pinker’s buyers to identify superior beans on their travels abroad. Although he visits prostitutes nightly, Wallis finds himself falling in love with Emily and supporting her campaign for women’s suffrage. When he proposes marriage, however, Pinker exiles him to Abyssinia to farm coffee under the tutelage of crusty Scotsman Hector Crannach. Wallis and Hector are accompanied by coffee broker Ibrahim Bey, and Bey’s two slaves, Fikre, a gorgeous African, and her eunuch guardian Mulu. Entranced, Wallis forgets Emily. Emily, meanwhile, mistakes politician Arthur Brewer for a kindred spirit. Wallis barters his last shilling for Fikre, and after a honeymoon of ecstatic lovemaking Wallis learns he’s been swindled: Ibrahim and Fikre have colluded to bankrupt him. Fikre escapes with Mulu, her true love. After Hector’s death (he’s mauled by a leopard) Wallis finds letters disclosing Hector’s affair with Emily. Disillusioned, Wallis returns to London, equipped with valuable life lessons from the tribesmen he’d tried and failed to exploit. He finds Emily married to Brewer, now an MP who’s shown his true male chauvinist colors. Back in Pinker’s employ, Wallis unwittingly abets Pinker’s conspiracy to manipulate the coffee market. Demonstrating that commodities futures and investor gullibility haven’t changed in a century or so, the ensuing “correction” benefits only Pinker and a few other major players. Finally proving his moral mettle, Wallis bows out, renouncing a fortune.

Despite its length, a fast-paced narrative propelled by Capella’s masterful characterizations of his principals, Wallis and Emily.

Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-553-80732-5

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Bantam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008

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THE NIGHTINGALE

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

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THE UNSEEN

A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.

Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.

A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.

Pub Date: April 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Biblioasis

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

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