When a woman gives a man coffee it is a way of showing her desire. - Abyssinian Proverb

London, 1897. It was a cup of coffee that changed Robert Wallis's life  - and a cup of very bad coffee at that. The would-be poet and bohemian is sitting in a London coffee house contemplating an uncertain future when he meets Samuel Pinker, coffee importer. He offers Wallace the very last thing a struggling artist in fin-de-siecle England could want: a job.

But the job Wallace is offered - composing a "vocabulary of coffees" that captures their many subtle and elusive flavours - is the beginning of an extraordinary adventure. For Wallis’s assistant is Pinker's idealistic daughter Emily. Despite their differences, they soon discover that you cannot interrogate one set of senses without awakening others. 

Then Wallis is dispatched to Africa in search of the source of the legendary Arab mocca. As he travels to coffee's birthplace - and sees the conditions in which the
crop is actually grown - he meets Fikre, the chattel of a powerful merchant, who makes him coffee in the traditional Abyssinian coffee ceremony. And when Fikre dares to slip Wallis a single coffee bean, everything he thought he knew – about coffee, about love, about himself – starts to unravel…..