If I say that Dave Eggers’s new book, The Monk of Mokha, is about coffee or about a young man’s coming of age or about winning material success, I say so because it isn’t entirely clear what this book is about, just as it is hard to make out what kind of book one is reading. Is it narrative nonfiction, immersion journalism, business how-to, the book version of a TED talk, or just a sort of add-on book, one meant to visually grace the backdrop of some upscale, hipster retail outlet—maybe even a high-end coffee shop?

THE MONK OF MOKHA by Dave Eggers Knopf, 352 pp., $28.95

The book follows Mokhtar Alkhanshali, a young man from a family of Yemeni immigrants in California who decides, in 2013, without much in the way of capital or formal education, to go on an adventurous quest to import coffee from Yemen. At the time, Mokhtar is working as a doorman at the Infinity, a plush residential building overlooking San Francisco Bay. Before this, he has been a salesman at a Banana Republic store and at a Honda dealership, enrolled at a community college, and dropped out from it because he doesn’t have enough money. Then, in a building across from the Infinity that dates back to the late 1800s and that once housed one of the oldest coffee import businesses in the United States, he discovers the connection between coffee and Yemen.

“According to legend, it was in Mokha, a port city on the Yemeni coast, that the bean was first brewed,” Eggers writes as this discovery ensues, going on at some length to offer a potted history of coffee. Eventually, of course, Mokhtar decides to try his hand at importing coffee from Yemen, even though the trade in coffee “was all but finished,” and goes on to meet with various mentor figures and potential business partners. It is only halfway through the book, when Mokhtar begins traveling around Yemen to meet coffee farmers, figuring out which beans he wants to export and how to process and transport them, that the narrative seems to come alive. Characters appear more boldly tinged than earlier in the book, the landscape more sharply etched.

Some of this has to do with the sheer turmoil Mokhtar encounters in his travels through Yemen. In 2015, during a buying trip, he gets caught in the opening clashes of Yemen’s civil war. By the time he is fleeing for California, there are no more flights, the roads are controlled by Houthi rebels from the north, and the Saudi Arabian air force is bombing rebels and civilians alike. In these scenes, in spite of the coffee beans Mokhtar has rather painstakingly collected, Yemen seems to push itself out of the pages with a certain determination, asserting itself as a place and a people that cannot be reduced either to a single commodity or to a mere backdrop for some kind of American finding-of-the-self project.

There is, for instance, Sadeq, whom Mokhtar meets on his pell-mell journey to catch a Greek freighter leaving from the port of Aden. A mysterious man who is described as having “a tangle of wild black hair” and wearing “a traditional outfit,” and whom people constantly suspect of being a Houthi agent, Sadeq is intriguing, and his motivations—in sharp contrast to Mokhtar’s—are hard to pin down. Similar questions arise about almost everyone else Mokhtar encounters during this escape, from various members of militias resisting Houthi rebels—men in tank tops and tracksuits who wave guns with abandon—to crazed prisoners who have soiled themselves in crammed, makeshift cells. They all seem to be parts of an incredibly complex story that raises new questions with each turn. Why are the Saudis, allies of the United States, allowed to bomb another country with impunity? What does the upheaval in Yemen have to do with the Western geopolitics of modern times, including the post–September 11 invasion of Iraq?