Bruce Wydick has a new book out, a novel with a development economics theme, The Taste of Many Mountains, byHarperCollins imprint Thomas Nelson.  Here is Bruce’s blurb:

The book is based on the true story of a group of graduate students from UC Berkeley and the University of San Francisco who, on a grant from USAID, were given the task of following a bag of fair trade coffee beans from a peasant grower in Guatemala all the way to a café in San Francisco, calculating the profit made at every stage.

In the novel, a series of unexpected events cause the students to engage in a dialogue about poverty and globalization issues, each coming from a different perspective. They befriend a peasant coffee growing family during their research, who recount stories of the history of coffee in their family over generations—then tragedy strikes and the students must choose how to respond, creating a context for their own growth and transformation. Along with having some interesting characters, there is a lot in the book about how modern empirically minded development economists go about understanding whether different types of development programs work or not.

I read an advance copy and can definitely recommend the novel.  It is great, and will be excellent for teaching development economics!