Dona Flor e seus dais maridos (1966)

Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands is the warmest and sexiest book here. Flor, who runs a cooking school in Bahia, loses her first husband, the gambling charmer Vadinho, who collapses in the middle of Carnival. She marries Teodoro, a respectable, orderly pharmacist. Then Vadinho comes back as a ghost, having lost none of his old ways. Jorge Amado's comedy is generous rather than cutting, full of food, music and Salvador street life, and recipes turn up in the text. Harriet de Onís's 1969 translation keeps the sly, gossipy narrator who makes the whole thing feel like a story told over a long dinner.