"In this second marriage there was no wooing, and this was as it should be, for it does not look right for a widow to be lovemaking in a corner or the doorway, cuddling, hugging, kissing, embracing, touching here, touching there, hand on breasts, slipping down to thigh."

"Poetic, comic, human" is how The Washington Post hailed Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, the international classic by Jorge Amado, Brazil's foremost novelist. This captivating fable celebrates heated passions, conjugal harmony, the rhythms of the samba, and the delectable joys of cooking.

Caught up in the pandemonium of carnival, the roguish and irresponsible Vadinho dos Guimaraes dies during a parade, leaving behind his long suffering wife, the irrepressible Dona Flor. As a widow, Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and an assortment of interfering but well-meaning friends who urge her to remarry. The lonely widow finds herself attracted to Dr. Teodoro Madureria, a kind, considerate pharmacist, who is everything the reckless Vadinho was not. Yet after their marriage, though content, Flor longs for her first husband's amorous, and exhausting, sensual pleasures. And Flor's desirous longing is so powerful that it brings the ghost of Vadinho back from the grave--right into her bed.