What readers think of The Monk of Mokha, plus links to write your own review.

It's a good thing this book is nonfiction. If it were a novel, no one would believe it! The author would be excoriated for creating an absurd and preposterous plot line and told to tone it down. A lot. But this isn't fiction. It really happened.

Let's back up. This is the story about a Yemini-American man named Mokhtar Alkhanshali, who grows up in San Francisco's Tenderloin district in a shabby apartment located between two porn stores. After a series of failures—school and business—Mokhtar comes up with the highly unlikely idea of exporting coffee from his home country of Yemen to the United States. This is as Yemen is being blown to smithereens by the Saudis. The country is not only plagued with frequent power failures, food scarcity and a government that is inept and ineffective, but also terrorism at the hands of Al-Qaeda and the Houthis. Yeah, that's a good time to set up a brand new export business.

Written by Dave Eggers, this extraordinary book will take you on a breathless, unexpected and dumbfounding—but true!—journey about coffee told in such a creative, almost mesmerizing way that you'll read it like a novel and never again look at your morning cup of joe in the same way.

If you love coffee and a grand adventure story, this is a must read.