Stories of coffee

David Liss was a graduate student in eighteenth-century literary studies when he published his first novel, A Conspiracy of Paper. Set during the period he studied, the novel combines the historical mystery genre with a fascinating background of the emergence of coffee-house commercial and intellectual culture, along with the social and political situations of Jews in London. I rather liked it, and so did a lot of other people, because it became a best-seller, and he was able to walk away from academia. He's since published at another novel with the same protagonist,

While looking for novels with a setting in Amsterdam, I found another book by Liss, The Coffee Trader. Once again, Liss gives us a fascinating look at the complexities of Jewish life in Europe, following Portuguese conversos, or "Secret Jews", who've fled Lisbon to live in the relative freedom of Amsterdam of the 1600s, a city becoming a hub of international commerce and finance. I enjoyed how Liss incorporated the details of daily life--food, domestic relations, taverns, the geography of the city, the relations between classes, the Dutch and foreigners--into a tale in which duplicity as the rules of business stands in uneasy relationship to the morality of the community.
A great follow-up to this novel is a book I bought in order to revise part of a course I'll be teaching again next Spring: Mark Pendergrast's Uncommon Grounds:/the History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World.