Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon

Jorge Amado

HarperCollins, 1978 - Fiction - 425 pages

One bright spring day in 1925, Gabriela arrives from the poverty-stricken backwoods of Brazil to the lively seaside port of Ilhéus amid a flock of filthy migrant workers. Though wearing rags and covered in dirt, she attracts the attention of Nacib, a cafe owner, who is in desperate need of a new cook. So dire is his situation that he hires the disheveled girl. The savvy young woman quickly proves to be an excellent chef and--once well-scrubbed and decently dressed--an eye-catching beauty. Nacib quickly finds himself the owner of the most prosperous business in town--and the employer of its most sought-after woman. One bright spring day in 1925, Gabriela arrives from the poverty-stricken backwoods of Brazil to the lively seaside port of IlhEus amid a flock of filthy migrant workers. Though wearing rags and covered in dirt, she attracts the attention of Nacib, a cafe owner, who is in desperate need of a new cook. So dire is his situation that he hires the disheveled girl. The savvy young woman quickly proves to be an excellent chef and --once well-scrubbed and decently dressed--an eye-catching beauty. Nacib quickly finds himself the owner of the most prosperous business in town--and the employer of its most sought-after woman.

Contents

• PART ONE or A Brazilian from the Arabies: 5
• THE LONELINESS OF GLORIA: 97
• Love or How Nacib Hired a Cook 129 Of: 160

About the author

Jorge Amado was born in 1912 in llhéus, the provincial capital of the state of Bahia, whose society he portrays in such acclaimed novels as Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon; Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands; and Tereza Batista: Home from the Wars. His father was a cocoa planter, and his first novel, Cacau, published when he was nineteen, is a plea for social justice for the workers on the cocoa estates south of Bahia. The theme of class struggle continued to dominate in his novels of the 1930s and '40s, but with the 1950s and Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon(1958), the political emphasis gave way to a lighter, more novelistic approach. It was in that novel, published in the United States when Amado was fifty and enthusiastically received in some fourteen countries, that he first explored the rich literary vein pursued in Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. A highly successful film version of Dona Flor was produced in Brazil in 1976.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon; Avon book; Bard Books; Borzoi books
• Author: Jorge Amado
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: HarperCollins, 1978
• Original from: University of Texas
• Digitized: Sep 26, 2008
• ISBN: 0380012057, 9780380012053
• Length: 425 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary