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    The Discovery of Chocolate: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Discovery of Chocolate: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Discovery of Chocolate: A Novel
    Ebook253 pages4 hours

    The Discovery of Chocolate: A Novel

    By James Runcie

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A wonderfully inventive and entertaining journey through time and the history of chocolate!

    The Discovery of Chocolate is a fabulous tale, as rich and exotic as the gorgeous creation that Diego de Godoy first discovers when he arrives in Mexico with Cortes and his conquistadors.

    Diego is seeking his fortune in the New World. What he finds is love, and chocolate, and an elixir of life. Separated from his lover, he must wander the world, and the centuries, in search of the fulfilment that he first knew in Mexico.

    In a series of dramatic episodes that are evocative, witty and thought-provoking, from revolutionary Paris to Freud’s Vienna, Fry’s Bristol and Hershey’s Pittsburgh, Diego and his ever-faithful greyhound, Pedro, seek the perfection of chocolate and the meaning of life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJun 28, 2012
    ISBN9780007406906
    Unavailable
    The Discovery of Chocolate: A Novel
    Author

    James Runcie

    James Runcie is an award – winning film-maker and writer. He is unashamedly forty-one and lives in St. Albans with his wife and two daughters. ‘The Discovery of Chocolate’ is his first novel, written because he finds the prospect of everlasting life far more frightening than death, and because, according to Vogue Magazine, “It’s official. People who eat chocolate live longer than those who do not.”

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    Reviews for The Discovery of Chocolate

    3/5

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    • 3/5

      The Discovery of Chocolate (2001) by James Runcie

      Diego de Godoy is one of the lesser lights of Cortez's expedition to the New World. There, amid the treachery and carnage, he discovers chocolate and the love of its supreme artisan, a woman he calls Ignacia. After a passionate retreat together, filled with chocolate- and love-making, they are separated by war -- but not before she tricks him into drinking an elixir of life. It's an elixir whose effects are stranger than merely conveying immortality, in fact, because his life seems thereafter to incorporate sudden slippages between one era and another, with intervening periods being spent at the same rate as the mortals with him he mingles. Needless to say, his intervals of ordinary history have a chocolatey theme, and he works with such luminaries of chocolate's tradition as Fry (in the UK) and Hershey (in the US; his opinion of Hershey's chocolate is much the same as mine, and in the book you'll find the technological reason for the judgement).

      This is all pretty jolly, with plenty of entertaining sex and lashings of chocolatey lore. Since I'm not particularly a chocolate fiend, I know that some of the book's attractions must have gone right past me; but it was an amiable read all the same.
    • 3/5
      A bit silly - the plot had a lot of potential but it seemed like it was written for an audience with a very simply reading comprehension level.
    • 3/5
      a few quotable lines--for your mushy love notes. some parts seem contrived; others flow and taste like rich chocolate.