the coffee trader a novel ballantine reader s circle

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In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Miguel Lienzo, a Portuguese-Jewish trader desperate to recover his lost fortune, enters into a partnership with seductive Geertruid Damhuis to introduce coffee to the city, and confronts a ruthless adversary.

An outsider in eighteenth-century London, Jewish pugilist and hired thug Benjamin Weaver prowls the city's mean streets in the service of England's gentry tracking down debtors and thieves, until the "accidental" death of his wealthy estranged father draws him into a dark conspiracy controlled by powerful men in the world of British finance. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 45,000 first printing.

It is December; Christmas is approaching and the magic of one of Europe's most beautiful cities beckons. A father looks for himself in the past, struggling to deal with a recent divorce, his teenage son in tow. A single, selfless mother accompanies her only daughter and friends for a weekend-long bachelorette party. And a husband treats his wife to a birthday weekend away, somehow heightening her anxieties and insecurities about age, desire, and motherhood. As these people brush against one another in the squares, museums, and parks of Amsterdam, their lives are transfigured in the winter light, and they encounter the complexities of love in a city that challenges what has gone before. Tender and humane, elevating the ordinary to something timeless and important, The Light of Amsterdam is a novel of compassion and rare dignity.

On the eve of Holland's liberation from the Nazis, Anton, a young man from a lower-class family stands on the bank of an Amsterdam river and recalls the golden summer of 1939, which he spent with David, a self-assured, affluent teenager, as they train as oarsmen on the river under the tutelage of a German coach. Reprint.

A sensual tale of art, lust, and deception—now a major motion picture In 1630s Amsterdam, tulipomania has seized the populace. Everywhere men are seduced by the fantastic exotic flower. But for wealthy merchant Cornelis Sandvoort, it is his young and beautiful wife, Sophia, who stirs his soul. She is the prize he desires, the woman he hopes will bring him the joy that not even his considerable fortune can buy. Cornelis yearns for an heir, but so far he and Sophia have failed to produce one. In a bid for immortality, he commissions a portrait of them both by the talented young painter Jan van Loos. But as Van Loos begins to capture Sophia's likeness on canvas, a slow passion begins to burn between the beautiful young wife and the talented artist. As the portrait unfolds, so a slow dance is begun among the household’s inhabitants. Ambitions, desires, and dreams breed a grand deception—and as the lies multiply, events move toward a thrilling and tragic climax. In this richly imagined international bestseller, Deborah Moggach has created the rarest of novels—a lush, lyrical work of fiction that is also compulsively readable. Seldom has a novel so vividly evoked a time, a place, and a passion. Praise for Tulip Fever “Sumptuous prose . . . reads like a thriller.”—The New York Times Book Review “An artful novel in every sense of the word . . . deftly evokes seventeenth-century Amsterdam’s vibrant atmosphere.”—Los Angeles Times “Need a brief escape into a beautiful and faraway world? Deborah Moggach’s wonderful Tulip Fever can offer you that.”—New York Post “Taut with suspense and unexpected revelations.”—Entertainment Weekly “Elegantly absorbing.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Returning to mid-eighteenth-century Lisbon to avenge the death of his father, Sebastian Foxx, the protégé of bounty hunter Benjamin Weaver, stealthily collects funds and identifies friends and allies among Inquisition spies.

After the death of her beloved father, Lucy becomes the unwanted boarder of her tyrannical uncle, fending off marriage to a local mill owner. But just as she is resigned to a life of misery, the poet and notorious rake Lord Byron arrives at her house with a cryptic message for Lucy.

In a serene, sensuous style of writing and through a compelling narrative of great psychological depth, Rembrandt's Whore does for the Dutch Master what Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring did for Vermeer. Immortalised in many of his greatest works of portraiture, Hendrickje Stoffels was Rembrandt's common law wife – and it is through her eyes that we are plunged into the midst of both a passionate affair and a turbulent era of Dutch history. First a servant, then his lover and confidante, Hendrickje fills the void in Rembrandt's life after the death of his wife and two of their children. But whilst they celebrate beauty, truth and art, Hendrickje is fated to discover the hypocrisy and fickleness of Amsterdam society, which ostracises her and precipitates Rembrandt's final collapse.

Charlie Howard doesn't just write books about a career thief, he also happens to be one. In Amsterdam working on his latest novel, Charlie is approached by a mysterious American who asks him to steal two apparently worthless monkey figurines from two separate addresses on the same night. At first he says no. Then he changes his mind. Only later, kidnapped and bound to a chair, the American very dead and a spell in police custody behind him, does Charlie begin to realise how costly a mistake he might have made. The police think he killed the American. Others think he knows the whereabouts of the elusive third monkey. But for Charlie only three things matter: Can he clear his name? Can he get away with the haul of a lifetime? And, can he solve the briefcase-shaped plot-hole in his latest novel?

"I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici, circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages." Thus wrote Leo Africanus, in his fortieth year, in this imaginary autobiography of the famous geographer, adventurer, and scholar Hasan al-Wazzan, who was born in Granada in 1488. His family fled the Inquisition and took him to the city of Fez, in North Africa. Hasan became an itinerant merchant, and made many journeys to the East, journeys rich in adventure and observation. He was captured by a Sicilian pirate and taken back to Rome as a gift to Pope Leo X, who baptized him Johannes Leo. While in Rome, he wrote the first trilingual dictionary (Latin, Arabic and Hebrew), as well as his celebrated Description of Africa, for which he is still remembered as Leo Africanus.

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