I confess that I enjoyed Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s phenomenal international best seller. Her blend of culinary celebration, spiritual exploration and romantic emancipation takes us from Italy to India and on to Indonesia. Gilbert’s humor, vulnerability and engaging writing style have made her book a benchmark in the travel/memoir category.

Explorer, lyricist and theatrical producer, Barbara Bonfigli has just released a new fictional travel/memoir that offers us all of these ingredients, and more! In Café Tempest, Bonfigli invites us to share a concentrated experience of food, spirit and love on an intimate Greek island. Your mouth will water from her savory descriptions of zucchini fritters and baklava (recipes included), your heart will race with the tempestuousness of love, and you’ll discover a remarkable depth of spiritual wisdom (and humor!) that shines through every page.

Bonfigli’s recipe for this fabulous first novel plays with the best elements of the approach of Gilbert and Peter Mayle (A Year in Provence) and combines them with ingredients from Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the Greek) and Shakespeare (The Tempest) to bring us a uniquely sumptuous literary feast.

Opa!