The best books about tea

There is no shortage of great books on the history of tea, but this one is my favorite because it is a global history of how a commodity, rather than a people, conquered the world. Carefully researched and engagingly written, the book begins its story in the seventeenth century, when China controlled the trade and Europe was a distant secondary market. The book then moves through tea's history—from exclusively Asian drink to staple at the heart of English identity—and the consequences for the planet and human history.

With the advent of food trucks, I can’t think of anything more charming or lovely than a tea shop that hits the road, and in a bright pink van, no less. Raisin’s writing goes straight to the point–we’re on the road with Rosie in no time, and it’s a journey you won’t want to miss. 

Progression fantasy is a young genre, and currently divides into a handful of different categories, the largest of which are LitRPGs and Cultivation fiction.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is almost universally praised as the best of the former.

I love it because it takes an impossible situation—Earth being transformed into a dungeon-delving murder reality show for the rest of the universe—and somehow injects equal mixes of humor and pathos.

I love that the main characters, the titular Carl and his cat, Donut, are the perfect emotional counterparts to the subgenre’s traditionally crunchy numbers… levels, skills, spells, and increasingly overpowered items all exist but don’t overshadow the essential humanity at the story’s center.

The prose is great, and the plot is even better.

Mog is a sweet old cat. She’s very loving to her family – The Thomas’s – but very dim. She doesn’t understand the human world and her hilarious misunderstandings get her into a lot of hot water. Occasionally, she accidentally saves the day too – usually from a disaster of her own making.

The combination of this lovable cat who gets it wrong is a perennial winner. The first Mog book was written over 50 years ago and has never been out of print.

A royal holiday getaway in the English countryside? Is there anything cozier than that?

This romance between the Queen’s private secretary and the mother of a royal designer is a whirlwind of hot chocolate, snowball fights, and everything pleasantly winter. (With some chaos thrown in for good measure, of course!) All of Jasmine Guillory’s books are amazing, but this is my favorite – and with older main characters, to boot!

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.

The first few chapters start off somber due to Ning losing her mother and dealing with her sister’s illness. Judy’s descriptions have struck a chord with me because it’s accomplished something I always seek in fantasy books: providing the escape from the stress of everyday life. As each character describes how tea is made, I’m taken on a new journey and excited about what’s to come, leaving me hungry for more. There’s something poetic and compelling about how Judy tells the story that forces the reader to listen. And once she pulls you in, you don’t want to put the book down. Judy’s craft is as calming as the tea her characters prepare, which provided a nice balance to the tension of the political turmoil.

This modern retelling of Sense and Sensibility charms with its tea shop setting, complicated sisterly relationships, and seamless prose.

But the real appeal to this book is the obvious love and expertise with which Lodge describes food, tea, and all their accoutrements. The delicious recipes at the end of each chapter certainly don’t hurt either.

Need some baking inspiration? Just flip through and choose from recipes like Cranberry Vanilla Scones, Pear and Earl Gray Hand Pies, and Raspberry Cream Cheese Kolaches.

It is only fair that John Ajvide Lindqvist gets two mentions out of my five. He is the Nordic author most committed to the genre and damn good at it to boot. As a result, there was a lot to choose from and yet I decided on the title that is possibly the least likely to hold mass appeal, despite a premise that might seem most horror reader’s cup of tea. Ten people in campervans, plus a dog and a cat, wake up to find the world as they knew it has disappeared. What happens next is presented from a multiple POW and is disturbing, harrowing, gory, and creepy. The part that is not for everyone is that the story is hard to wrap your head around. But for those horror aficionados that do not need a perfect explanation at the end are in for a hell of a ride… show more.

Is there anything better to read by a fireplace than Jane Austen herself? Northanger Abbey isn’t one of her most widely-read books, but I’m making a case for you to pick it up today.

It’s a delightful and at times hilarious spoof of the gothic novels that were popular at the time, but true to Austen, the romance at the center of it – between naïve and caring Catherine Morland and the original golden retriever love interest, Henry Tilney – is the beating heart of the story. (Even though Catherine probably thinks that there are actual beating hearts under the floorboards or something.)

Buy it, read it, and then read Ghosted a second time for good measure, to pick up any fun easter eggs you may have missed!

I love the combination of a historical mystery with a little-known location, but this book also charmed me with a spare but fluid writing style. Ceylon in the 1930s under British rule (today Ceylon is the independent nation of Sri Lanka) sets the first book in the addictive Inspector Shanti de Silva mystery series in a riveting yet mostly overlooked moment in history. Add a superbly written cast of characters and set them at odds against each other, and I’m hooked on the whole series.

De Silva is the head of a 3-person police force in the smallish city of Nuala where he must straddle the divide between the local population and his British bosses. Reports of a cruel tea plantation owner lead to a missing worker and the owner’s suspicious debt. A dubious business associate, a frazzled wife, and a chatty mynah bird all combine to add layers of… show more.

Okakura links Taoist and Zen philosophy to the tangible world by way of the aesthetics of tea, which are actually the aesthetics of life itself.  The title of this slim volume is disarmingly understated, then. It is the most approachable book on aesthetics I know.

Laura Childs is the reason I read and write fiction today. When her debut tea shop cozy mystery came out in 2001, I was still working as a journalist and was waiting inside a local bookstore to interview a Pentagon official, who had just released his first military thriller. Killing time, I browsed the paperback books, a section of the store I’d never considered before. When I laid eyes on Death by Darjeeling, birds started singing and fairy dust floated through the air. Who knew I could enjoy fiction? Readers have asked why I have no plans to write a tea-themed cozy series myself, and I’ll tell you why: I don’t think I could top Laura Childs.

This is the book I had been waiting for and was so delighted when it appeared. It provides a fascinating and sweeping account of the meaning of tea in Chinese culture from its earliest appearance to the late imperial period. Benn has a wonderful eye for examples and delicious details that illuminate how religion, art, poetry, class, and gender created a commodity and culture that travelled around the world. A great place to start if you are interested in the history of tea or China.

This book takes the fish out of water trope I just spoke about in a whole different direction. In Vainqueur, it’s not so much a fish, as a hungry shark that finds itself out of its usual element. 

A dragon wakes up from a lengthy nap and finds that the whole world is now an RPG-style game. It can level up, gain abilities, and accept quests. Thankfully, it’s a bloody big dragon, which makes some of the quests a tad easier to complete.

The dragon really steals the show and behaves exactly as you’d expect a grumpy old murder machine might. The book has wonderful dialogue and a fresh perspective on some of the genre tropes. It’s a nice easy read, with the perfect amount of groveling minions.      

This picture book blends fiction and non-fiction in a brilliant package. It’s part of a series about little KeeKee, a cat who is bursting with the innocence and curiosity of young children, as she travels the world to famous cities. In London, she sees some of the main tourist landmarks and has tea with a certain elegant old woman in Buckingham Palace. I think the book simply stands out because it’s so sincere. KeeKee’s excitement about everything is palpable and while the book has some sound facts in it, it brings the big world down to a tiny, friendly pint-size and is filled with joy.  

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… show more.

For comfort reading, I like period children’s stories, as written by, say, E.Nesbit, Noel Streatfield, Richmal Crompton. Childhood seems to have been more fun when it came up against the constraints of an adult society more formal than our own. Gillian Avery’s achievement was to write spirited historical children’s stories that have all the social nuance you would find in the above authors. The Greatest Gresham (written in 1962, set in the 1890s) is about the timid children of one family who are brought out of their shells by the bolder kids next door, and it all feels just right. For instance, when the mother of the timid children is out on her ‘calling’ (or visiting) day, they always have tea with the family maids, one of whom habitually reads their fortune in their tea leaves. 

In her Seaside Café Mysteries, Bree Baker has conjured a thoroughly modern tea shop with Surf, Sand, and Tea, a business located in an old Victorian home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Everly Swan (fun name!) has lots of varieties of iced tea on offer, and two elderly aunts bring some well-plotted family history into the mix. This series gives a modern-day spin to the tearoom enterprise, and this seven-book series ended far too soon for my taste.

John Griffiths has a talent for bringing history to life so that we are carried along by his storytelling and fluid narrative. We imagine ourselves right there with the characters he describes – the British East India Company and their opium trade with China; the spies and adventurers who brought tales of tea to the west; the merchants who encouraged the trade; and the botanists, politicians, government officials and pioneers planters who risked so much to establish the tea industry in India. Griffiths immerses us is every aspect of the business from its 16th-century beginnings to the famous companies of the 20th century, and along the way, dips into all that lies behind the story of success. Enlightening and fascinating!