The Monk of Mokha was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2018. Mokhtar Alkhanshali grew up in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, the son of Yemeni immigrants. Working as a doorman at a luxury apartment building, he discovered that Yemen — his ancestral country — was the birthplace of the global coffee trade, that the port of Mocha (Al Mokha) gave its name to the drink, and that Yemeni coffee, once the most prized in the world, had been reduced to a marginal curiosity. He decided to revive it.
Mokhtar traveled to Yemen, hiked into the highlands where coffee was still grown on ancient terraces, and began working with farmers to improve their techniques and connect them with the specialty coffee market. He was making real progress when, in March 2015, Saudi Arabia began bombing Yemen. Mokhtar was trapped in a war zone with bags of carefully sourced green coffee beans and no way out. His escape — by boat across the Red Sea, through Djibouti, and eventually back to San Francisco with his samples intact — is the book’s dramatic spine.
Eggers tells the story with his characteristic combination of journalistic detail and narrative momentum. The book works simultaneously as an adventure story (the war zone escape), a business narrative (the specialty coffee market), a cultural history (Yemen’s role in the global coffee trade), and an immigrant story (Mokhtar’s negotiation between his American life and his Yemeni heritage). The coffee Mokhtar eventually brought to market — Port of Mokha — scored among the highest ratings in the industry.
Collecting The Monk of Mokha
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2018): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12