I'm a writer and a botanist with a lifelong interest in nature. I grew up in southern England where I spent my time running around the fields and woods searching for birds, insects and wild plants (as one does). As well as writing about nature, I run plant identification training courses and have a genetics PhD.
This is a book for people who like to come home to a steaming mug of tea after a long walk in the countryside – rain or shine. Kate Humble takes us with her on her walks through the year, both at home and abroad. Her descriptions of the Wye Valley make you want to put on your wellies and walk out the door, dogs in tow, ready to splash through puddles, hop styles, and walk beneath the trees and the clouds. It is a lovely reminder that it is so often the little things in life that can bring us the most happiness: muddy walks in the woods, chatting to friends over a pot of coffee, watching the sky change as the sun rises. I love this book so much: it’s a lesson in the benefits of learning to live in the moment and to not take the simple…
'I've discovered that going for a daily walk has become as essential to me feeling good for the rest of the day as that first cup of tea. But I would argue that all I am doing is responding to a natural need we all have. Humans have always been migrants, the physiological urge to be nomadic is deep-rooted in all of us and perhaps because of that our brains are stimulated by walking. I solve all sorts of problems, formulate ideas, work things out to that gentle rhythm of self-propelled movement.' - Kate Humble
Abi Oliver is a pen name as my real name is Annie Murray—I write under both names. My first book, A New Map of Love, set in the 1960s, featured an older woman who had been born in India. She developed into such a character—a bit of an old trout to be truthful—that I wanted to tell her story. It also tapped into my family’s many connections with India and the fact that I have travelled a lot there. I finally got to travel, with my oldest daughter, and stay in one of the tea gardens in Assam—a wonderful experience.
I am a total tea-head, so any book about the history of how we all came to be addicts is a good start. This one is particularly gripping and reads like an adventure novel. Robert Fortune, a Scottish botanist, and industrial spy, was employed by the East India Company in 1848 to be smuggled into China and steal their tea-growing secrets. The book never flags, full of information about the opium wars, the Chelsea Physic garden and how the tea, later found to grow naturally in India, was made into a consumer product garnering enormous profits. As I grew up with a family member who disappeared to work in Assam tea gardens just before I was born, I have always been fascinated by this way of life.
Robert Fortune was a Scottish gardener, botanist, plant hunter - and industrial spy. In 1848, the East India Company engaged him to make a clandestine trip into the interior of China - territory forbidden to foreigners - to steal the closely guarded secrets of tea.
For centuries, China had been the world's sole tea manufacturer. Britain purchased this fuel for its Empire by trading opium to the Chinese - a poisonous relationship Britain fought two destructive wars to sustain. The East India Company had profited lavishly as the middleman, but now it was sinking, having lost its monopoly to trade…
As a historian of science and medicine, I’m fascinated by the many ways that drugs—from tea to opiates, Prozac to psychedelics—have shaped our world. After all, there are few adults on the planet today who don’t regularly consume substances that have been classified as a drug at one time or another (I’m looking at you, coffee and tea!). The books I’ve selected here have deeply influenced my own thinking on the history of drugs over the past decade, from my first book, The Age of Intoxication, to my new book on the history of psychedelic science.
This ambitious and readable book explores how a seemingly simple beverage—tea—became a force shaping global empires. Rappaport, a historian at UC Santa Barbara, documents how tea has influenced everything from global trade networks and consumer cultures to ideas about health, morality, and national identity over the past three centuries.
Readers follow tea’s rise to become a key global commodity, moving from the courtly culture of tea in imperial China to the pages of Victorian magazines and the vast plantations of India and East Africa. This book made me think in a new way about the origins of modern-day consumer culture—not to mention the cup of tea I’m drinking as I write this.
How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism
Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. For centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes-in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies-the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes an in-depth historical look at how men and women-through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa-transformed global tastes and habits. An expansive and original global history of imperial…
I’ve always been besotted with crime fiction. As a journalist in Scotland, I got to experience real-life crime on a daily basis. And the world of cozy crime fiction became a very valuable, indispensable escape for me. So, when it came to coming up with my characters for The Bingo Hall Detectives, I knew that I had to create a cast, a setting, a mystery even, that would take me out of the relentlessness of the real world and into the confines of a bloody good read. And I’m so glad I did. The Bingo Hall Detectives series is very dear to me and I’m very lucky to be able to bring it to readers.
I love a great mystery and I adore fantastic characters.
That’s why A Spoonful of Murder is so high on my list. It’s cozy crime with attitude. Having a detective story that doesn’t feature any actual detectives is the challenge for all cozy crime writers.
And J.M. Hall does this with such verve, vigour, and lightness of touch that you find it impossible not to fall in love with Liz, Pat, and Thelma.
There’s a wonderful fraternity amongst us cozy crime writers and I’m very lucky to count Mr. Hall as a friend. He makes me want to be a better author, just to keep up with him!
I fell into the world of tea by chance in the 1980s when I gave up a career in higher education to open a 1930s style tearoom in southwest London. I grew up in the 1950s in a typical British family that drank tea throughout the day but little did I know, as I baked endless supplies of scones and cakes for the tearoom at 4 am every day, that I would end up writing books and magazine articles, editing a tea magazine for the UK Tea Council, speaking at world tea conferences, training staff in hotels, travelling to almost every major tea producing country, and eventually working today as Director of Studies at the UK Tea Academy.
The story of Britain’s tearooms is often thought to have begun in London but it was Stuart Cranston and his sister Kate in Glasgow who were responsible for opening Scotland’s first public tearooms. This lovely book explores the very beginnings when Stuart Cranston’s decided to install a few tables and chairs at his tea retail store in 1875 so that customers could taste teas before buying. Kate followed suit but added her own distinctive style by employing Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife to design the now world-famous Willow Tea Rooms. The charming story links inextricably with tea, Glasgow, art, design and business and, since the original Willow on Sauchiehall Street has now been totally renovated and refurbished in Mackintosh style, Kinchin’s book is particularly valuable.
In 1896, Kate Cranston, the pioneer of Glasgow tea rooms in the late nineteenth century, commissioned Charles Rennie Mackintoshwho would become one of the Western worlds most renowned designersto design her tea rooms, and over the next two decades he did so with dazzling inventiveness. (Mackintoshs wife, Margaret, herself an artist, also made important contributions to the interior designs.) Cranston and Mackintosh opened up a unique, avant-garde artistic world to thousands of ordinary people and their tea rooms became internationally famous. Taking Tea with Mackintosh illustrates their exciting collaboration with black-and-white historical photographs of the tea rooms and color photographs…
I grew up surrounded by a library of dusty vintage novels, so perhaps it wasn’t that surprising that I went on to write my own gaslamp fantasy influenced by English folklore and Victorian heroines. I love historical novels that provoke wonder, and magical novels that are rich with history, and (blame it on being an only child?) most of all I love a female protagonist I’d want to have tea with.
I loved the soft and quiet governess Elaine and the way she uses her unique magic. The surprising 1820s post-apocalyptic setting draws you in immediately, and the allusions to The Lady of Shallot are perfect.
I’d like to share a nice cup of tea with Elaine, and with her magical abilities, we would always have fresh water for the teapot.
Elaine thought she’d be safe in Brighton. But then the sea rose up and flooded the city. Now, fish dwell in submerged ground floors, mists wreathe the ruined houses, and faery creatures roam the watery streets.
Trapped in an attic for several months, protected by small enchantments, Elaine’s supplies are running low. But she doesn't dare risk the dangers outside, until the night her hiding place is discovered by a roguish treasure hunter who brings trouble in his wake.
Forced into the open, Elaine must finally confront her past, battle an old foe, and protect the family legacy…
My interest in ghosts is partly due to growing up in York, which is one of the most haunted cities in the UK. In that city, I think that pretty much every pub has its own ghost, and if you’re unlucky (or lucky) enough, you stand a good chance of spotting long-dead Roman soldiers, plague victims, or ghostly dogs as you walk the streets. This atmosphere has seeped into my fiction; I have written two novels of the supernatural and am currently working on a third. I’ve also made a study of the grim and gothic in fiction; my Ph.D. thesis was largely about vampires (especially Dracula) but also strayed into other monsters and uncanny stories over the past two centuries.
This book parodies the gothic novels popular in Jane Austen’s time. Ann Radcliffe, whose novel Udolpho features prominently, was the queen of this genre. Her stories boast chilling elements like murder plots, the Spanish Inquisition, skeletons, evil nuns, and more.
The heroine of this book, Catherine Morland, enjoys this kind of writing a bit too much; mistaking real life for fiction leads her to see murder and intrigue where there is none. It’s a good warning for us imaginative types not to let fantasy run away with us. (There’s no harm in enjoying a spooky tale within reason, though; Henry Tilney, the novel’s level-headed hero, has read Udolpho and thoroughly enjoyed it.)
Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent.
Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her.
In this, her first full-length novel, Austen also fixes her sharp, ironic gaze on other kinds of contemporary novel, especially the Gothic school made famous by Ann Radcliffe. Catherine's reading becomes intertwined with her…
As a teenager I loved the post-apocalyptic genre, especially John Wyndham and H G Wells, and as a scientist I’ve become increasingly aware of the threats to society, especially from climate change and pandemics. But it seems to me that any collapse will be gradual: yes, the weather will worsen, and the seas will rise; but those won’t happen overnight. We’re unlikely to see a pandemic that kills everyone, but we could well see a train of smaller ones. This is the world of Truth Sister: it’s changed, but we’ve had time to adapt. The books in my list have different takes on how a post-civilisation world might look. Enjoy!
Itäranta is a Finnish author now living in the UK, and Memory of Water was nominated for several SF prizes.
This time, climate change has produced a serious scarcity of water, and the book, about how a young tea master's apprentice becomes possessed of important knowledge, touches on how people’s behaviour can become more primitive, against a backdrop of increasing military suppression. Again, its strength is its believability.
With the lyricism of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and the world building brilliance of Atwood, Emmi Itaranta's effortless and poignant debut novel is a coming of age story full of emotional drama and wonderment. 'Where itaranta shines is in her understated but compelling characters' Red star review, Publishers Weekly. Some secrets demand betrayal. 'You're seventeen, and of age now, and therefore old enough to understand what I'm going to tell you,' my father said. 'This place doesn't exist.' 'I'll remember,' I told him, but didn't realise until later what kind of promise I had made. When Noria Kaitio reaches…
I’m a full-time writer, part-time editor, and avid reader of romances between queer women. I’ve just published my twenty-third novel, and I’m still amazed and humbled at getting to live my dream: writing sapphic romances for a living. Discovering sapphic books was a life-saver for me since I grew up in a tiny little village, with no openly LGBT+ people around, and I love knowing that my books are now doing the same for my readers.
Just from the book’s back cover description, I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did because any kind of cheating and love triangles are not my cup of tea in a romance novel. If you are the same, give this book a chance anyway. Jan—who cared for her husband for years—and the much-younger writer Terry never planned to fall in love, but when they do, the author handles it with complexity and integrity. It’s a book that will make you feel all the emotions the characters are going through.
A triangle with a twist, Coming Home is the story of three good people caught up in an impossible situation.
Rob, a charismatic ex-fighter pilot severely disabled with MS, has been steadfastly cared for by his wife, Jan, for many years. Quite by accident one day, Terry, a young writer/postal carrier, enters their lives and turns it upside down.
Injecting joy and turbulence into their quiet existence, Terry draws Rob and Jan into her lively circle of family and friends until the growing attachment between the two women begins to strain the bonds of love and loyalty, to Rob and…
Long before I became a writer, I was a mom and a teacher. Over some 25 years, I read hundreds, thousands of picture books to kids. I fell in love with the lyrical language, the amazing variety, and the ways picture book authors and illustrators tell a complete story, engage kids (and adults!), and keep readers turning the pages. To me, picture books are an extraordinary gift not only for a young audience, but also for the parents, caregivers, teachers, and librarians who share them with kids. I hope these picture book suggestions inspire you to create special memories with the children you know and love.
When one of her family members goes to school to learn English, Luli passes the time in the classroom next door with other children her age. She can’t speak English, and neither can they.
“All around the room, children played alone.” Luli notices that although the kids don’t share the same language, many do speak the language of tea. And that’s when she decides to plan a tea party for her friends. “Hands curled around warm cups. Mouths curved into shy smiles.” The mood shifts. The playroom is no longer quiet. Luli’s teapot is empty, “but her heart was full.”
Beautifully written, with charming illustrations, Luli and the Language of Tea is about community, shared traditions, and the language of small thoughtful acts that bring people together.
Though they may speak different languages, kids from all over the world come together to enjoy the shared pastime of tea in this delicious book for young readers.
When five-year-old Luli joins her new English as a Second Language class, the playroom is quiet. Luli can’t speak English, neither can anyone else. That’s when she has a brilliant idea to host a tea party and bring them all together.
Luli removes her teapot, thermos, and teacups from her bag and calls out “Chá!” in her native Chinese. One by one, her classmates pipe up in recognition: in Russian, Hindi, Turkish,…
