Best regards from Croatia! Me and my girlfriend read two of your italian-food-and-travel books, and got really opsessed with the idea of spending this summer vespa-driving through the south of italy, from naples to sicily. of course, eating in village restaurants and trying to find the best melanzana alla parmigiana. can you reccomend some stops in that part of italy with good restaurants, or some places that had a good impresion on you? mario&vanja

Hi Mario and Vanja,

I''ve written articles recently about where to eat in Tuscany, and where to eat in south-east Sicily, and slightly longer ago about Naples. The easiest way to get the articles is via The Times Online, doing a search for ''Capella''. If you get to Sicily, I strong suggest that you visit Syracuse - the old town, Ortigia, is a really lovely, laid back place with great seafood, and the local towns such as Ragusa and Noto are stunning.

best,

Anthony

Hi Anthony I don't really have a question but I needed to tell you how grateful I am you are writing another novel:) I am working for Penguin books in SA and we are the distributors for Little Brown. I have been selling your books for years and only dipped into Food of Love years ago when it came out. Well on leave in April I decided to read the Wedding Officer and fell in love with the characters and the food!! It made me hungry all the time. So you can imagine my surprise when I started work on Monday and see you have a new one out later in the year. I have the manuscript and cannot wait to start reading tonight. Thanks for writing wonderful books and also for making my life easier with that illusive budgets. I hope you don't mind but you will be hearing from my marketing department through the right channels. Kind regards Sonja Vorster

Thank you Sonja - I''m really fortunate to have great publishers across the world. Let me know what you think of it - it takes a rather different approach from the previous books, and I''m always nervous about how people who have liked the others will react to that......  

Hi Anthony, I'm doing an assignment for my Masters in Creative Writing at Portsmouth Uni and have chosen the title 'The literary effects of placing English characters in an overseas setting'. This gives me a great excuse to include 'The Wedding Officer' and 'The various flavours of coffee', which I thoroughly enjoyed. I just wondered what your thoughts are, as the author, on the positives and challenges of taking your characters out of their comfort zones and putting them in an 'exotic' setting? I'm also trying to weave in a way of including 'The Food of Love' in there too - its still one of the most delicious books I've ever read! Really looking forward to 'The Empress of ice cream'... Thanks, Ann

Hi Ann,

Interesting question, and I''ll try to give it a serious answer.

I suppose the answer will differ from writer to writer. For me, it relates to what I''ve written elsewhere about food being a metaphor with many different meanings. In the Wedding Officer it''s clear that James Gould is a product of a certain repressed, blinkered, British-Empire-public-school upbringing. War brings him forcibly - even unwillingly - into contact with a completely different culture; food (and its close cousin sex) are the means by which one culture breaks down another, opening his eyes to a different set of values - with the comic twist that he''s the officer responsible for repressing that more sensual, forgiving culture amongst his own side''s troops. 

Something similar is true for Laura in the Food of Love - although she isn''t repressed, she is ripe for an adventure in a foreign country very different from her own (there are some brief mentions of her backstory, and particularly her mother, that support this.) - she feels, deep down, that there''s something wrong with dating other ex-pats in Rome. 

Coffee is a little bit different - the jungle has a different value system from Robert''s, certainly, but it isn''t so much that he adopts those values as that Africa, and the jungle, and Fikre, are the ''oven'' that ''roasts'' his green, naieve self into something that is both more bitter but also potentially more mature. And, of course, it''s in the jungle that he comes across real humanity and unselfishness for the first time, amongst the Oromo. (There''s a point late in the book where someone says somethimng about the law of the jungle, meaning Darwinian dog-eat-dog; he replies that from his experience of jungles, their laws are considerably more complex than that.)

It isn''t necessary to go abroad in order to get this kind of conflict, but it certainly brings it into focus. And of course, on a very basic level, it''s interesting for the reader to learn about different cultures. Hollywood uses the phrase ''fish out of water'' to describe a certain kind of culture-clash story: it''s also very relevant to novels. Christopher Booker, in his The Seven Basic Plots,  uses the phrase ''voyage-and-return'' to  describe coming-of-age stories: it''s clearly easier to plot that kind of archetype if you are dealing with an actual voyage.

Interestingly, The Empress of Ice Cream does this in reverse - it takes an Italian and a Frencwoman, and brings them to England.  

You might be interested to read one of my favourite books - ''Brother of the More Famous Jack'' by Barbara Trapido, the middle section of which takes place in Italy. There are echoes of that book in all of my books so far. 

best, Anthony    

Loved your book. When will u write The Various Flavours of Chocolate

Never, I suspect. Chocolate''s been done, and very well...

What am i doing right now?

Typing?

Dear Anthony I am writing to declare my love for your writing and utter envy for the life you must lead. Not wishing to undermine how hard you work I must confess I think dipping in and out of writing and eating must be incredible! I have read The Food of Love and a couple of your travel articles but have yet to start The Various Flavours of Coffee which is waiting on the bookshelf. I am going to Italy for a month this summer and feel so excited after reading how passionate you are about it and the many flavours I shall be sampling. Anyway, I just wanted to express my appreciation for your wonderful writing. Thank you, Sophie, 16

Dear Sophie,

Thank you - but believe me, my life is probably not as glamourous as you imagine. Whilst I''m lucky enough to do what I love, and love what I do, I spend most of my time in a freezing room in Oxfordshire, wondering when I''m going to finish the book, article, to-do list or whatever, and dreaming - like everybody else - of occasional travel to interesting places..... I always say to interviewers, I may be able to write about food, but that doesn''t help me cook it.

Hope you like Flavours of Coffee! Do write and let me know.

regards, Anthony    

dear mr. capella i believe in food. i think food is a most profound form of energy. it makes love tangible and it belongs to the people, including and especially the little people. oil is nothing to it. many years ago when my espresso machine broke, i brought it to a man on the lower east side of new york who performed a service which is fast becoming extinct - he fixes things. when he told me it would take at least a month to get the part to fix my machine, i said to him let me explain something about my marriage. every morning my husband makes me a beautiful cup of espresso and no matter what is wrong between us, the coffee makes it better, or at least helps it to head in that direction. he understood and had the machine back to me in two weeks. sadly my marriage did not outlast the machine, but i now make myself that cup every morning. self love matters too, after all. food has been corrupted, and we pay the price for that with our health and with the health of the planet itself. but there are many of us who know that to sit together cutting slits into chestnuts while talking, is one of many tiny and profound ways that the planet is healed. and so we do it each day. do you know the last scene of the film "big night" when the one brother makes his brother an egg in real time, and then they sit together and eat it like holy communion? all of the many eggs i have made my daughter - all of the times i've reached out for her hand and felt it there, bigger each year. i could go on. but i'll stop by saying that your books fill my heart the way a bowl of my mother's pasta once did. thank you for all you know and all you seek. thank you for sharing those things so eloquently and with such heart. lisa-maria radano

Thank you Lisa-Maria - I do agree with you. And Big Night is one of my all-time favourite movies too, and I urge every reader to see it. Stanley Tucci is just amazing.

regards, Anthony

I just finished the last page, and logged on to find your website--thank you for a wonderful novel. I kept it around several weeks before starting it, and when I finally had the time to read it, found I could not wait to get back to it every time I had to put it down this week. I accidentally left it outside in the rain-- when I found it, I stood with a blowdryer to dry it enough to finish it. My question for you-- have you been to Ethiopia? Can you tell me how you came up with the Kiku character? I loved her! Another question-- I saw a play about the "hysteria treatment" at Berkeley Rep. Theatre several months ago-- have you seen or read the play? I can't recall the name, but will look it up-- again, thanks for a marvelous read--Mary

Dear Mary - thank you for the nice comments.

I haven't actually been to Ethiopia - the part I write about is now mostly under the control of the Somali warlords (not Harar, but the desert crossing from Aden, the old slave route). I relied on research, principally Charles Nicholl's excellent book on Rimbaud's years as a coffee trader, 'Somebody Else', plus Flaubert's letters home and the journals of the fascinating explorer Mary Kinglsley - the touch of Edwardian whimsey in Robert's letters (natives "having dances and playing rump-a-tump tunes not unlike Wagner") all comes from her . I was born in Africa, though, and have travelled around the south a fair bit.

Kiku's belief system is based on the real beliefs of the oromo - look up 'siiqqee' on the internet if you're interested. And the hysteria stuff was definitively written about by Rachel Moines, whose PhD thesis rediscovered the practices of a whole period. So I can't claim any great historical originality - only that I managed to patch them all together into one story!

regards, Anthony      

Hello. My name is Eman from the United States. I found your book, The Various Flavors of Coffee, lying on a shelf for mystery books at my library. It drew me in like a flowery chestnut flavored cup of coffee... The writing style was phenomenal, and the cover was alluring. Your vocabulary is professional, glamorous, and sophisticated. I have not finished your book, as I have only checked it out a few days ago...but I have no complaint. I just wish to send you my warmest thanks on such a deeply profound and sensational novel. Salaam (means peace be with you in Arabic), Eman, 17

Dear Eman,

many thanks - will you let me know what you think of it once you''ve finished it? I''d be very interested.

best, Anthony

Hi Anthony I am currently on the Tempus Committee of my school which is the student online newsletter. It would be really great if I could write up an interview with you! Can you please answer the following quick questions?!: What is your favourite colour? What did you want to be when you were a child? What is your favourite country? What is your favourite dish? Your favourite icecream flavour? Favourite type of music? Any tips for aspiring writer? Thank you! Olivia

Dear Olivia,

Sure - black; a poet; (some connection there, perhaps); Italy; whatever I''m eating next (particularly if it involves lamb); anything right in season particularly if it involves sicilian lemons or leonforte peaches (you''ll find a lot more details about that when my next book, The Empress of ice Cream, comes out in a few months); I''m a bad, failed, blues guitarist who once played in a heavy-metal band.... and my big tip is, finish. If you finish the book, you''re a writer. Until then, you''re not.   

best, Anthony