tea in fiction

I know we've done this before.

I came across this description of Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant:

"When an intruder is captured on the palace grounds attempting to steal several scrolls, Lt. Erdemoglu Selim interrogates her with tea and biscuits. He tells his superior what he learns: Delilah Dirk is a daring adventurer, a skilled fighter and an escape artist. After she breaks out of her cell, Selim is held responsible. Delilah saves him from the executioner's ax because he makes the finest tea in Europe."

tantalizing.

At a meeting of Magicals Anonymous:

"Sharon looked at Mrs. Rafaat, who shrugged. "I'm so sorry, dear. I rather feel like I'm having something of an existential crisis. Might I have another cup of tea?" Rhys was at the kettle before Mrs. Rafaat had completed her request. This was something he did know how to accomplish. In the confusion of recent hours, replete with human sacrifice, blood-soaked monsters and a CEO with an ambitious and unusual business model, tea was a lighthouse of certainty in a stormy sea."

- Stray Souls by Kate Griffin

In The Unhandsome Prince we meet the sorcerer, Bungee, in his workshop:

Bungee pushed back the sleeves of his robe and stared nearsightedly at a brazier. He sprinkled a pinch of black powder over the coals, then nodded approvingly as a thin sheen of blue flame appeared and spread itself across the fuel. Over it he placed a small caldron of black iron. When the liquid inside began to bubble and roil, he stirred in two measures of finely ground gray leaves and watched with satisfaction as the water turned a deep orange-red.
”You don’t mind making the tea, I hope.”

It's magical!

Other descriptive bits about his workshop:

Copper bowls and stoneware pestles were neatly stacked and arranged according to size. Pinned to the wall was a Periodic Table of the Elements, showing all four of them – earth, fire, wind and water.

I've just been reading the Chronicles of St. Mary's series, and it is repeatedly made clear that St. Mary's (an unusual historical research center) runs on tea.

First one in the series: Just One Damned Thing After Another, by Jodi Taylor

>4 staffordcastle: I really enjoyed that series.

>4 staffordcastle: I've requested my library buy the first book.

"And even the dead will drink tea if they can."

short story "Telling the Bees" by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon)

From The African Queen, by C.S. Forester:

"What about a cup o' tea, Miss?"

Tea! Heat and thirst and fatigue and excitement had done their worst for Rose. She was limp and weary, and her throat ached. The imminent prospect of a cup of tea roused her to trembling excitement. Twelve cups of tea, each, Samuel and she had drunk daily for years. To-day she had had none -- she had eaten no food either, but at the moment that meant nothing to her. Tea! A cup of tea! Two cups of tea! Half a dozen great mugs of tea, strong, delicious, revivifying! Her mind was suffused with rosy pictures of an evening's tea drinking, a debauch compared with which the spring sowing festivities at the village by the mission station were only a pale shade.

"I'd like a cup of tea," she said.

New tea book: The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See. It's described as "a sweeping historical novel that juxtaposes ancient China with its modern incarnation" and centers around a young woman from a Yunnan Pu'er tea farming family.

Not a quote from a book. Just a note to self to do this every day!!

So I unearthed this book that I forgot about, The History of Tea and how am I the only one on library thing that has it? I brought it out to to finally read and more than just tea it goes into fiction and letters and things. It look neat. :).

>12 WeeTurtle: There were six more copies now combined. Hey, that sounds like a perfect book for the season and for this thread. Do report back ocassionaly.

Daughter showed me a book she is enjoying. It's a graphic novel. The Tea Dragon Society. A chapter for each season and then a section on caring for tea dragons and describing the varieties.

Sampled The Vintage Teacup Club, but I didn't like it well enough to continue it. The first page was nice, with three women hovering over a tea set at a flea market. They agree to buy the set together and share it over a period of time. The concept had potential, but … I wasn't impressed with the delivery.

I saw this when I was reading The Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny this week. The speaker is a Quebecois police inspector.

"The Anglos in Three Pines were always pressing tea on each other in times of stress. . . . He'd thought it vile at first. The tea. But then, somewhere along the line, he found he looked for it. Hoped they'd offer it. And drank it with pleasure, though he didn't show it. He found now that just the aroma of Red Rose calmed him. He didn't even have to drink it."

Was poking around in the talk threads and completely forgot about my tea history book! I remembered this though:

***
Lamb sighs and stands up. Every one of us flinches. "I'm going to need a cup of tea."

"Oh, thank magic," Penelope says at the same time as Simon says, "Tea?" and Baz says, "Crowley below, please let us have some."

I always accept food and drunk from Maybes, though it can be a risky business. (My mother would be horrified if I ever turned down food as a guest in someone else's home.) But I'm surprised to see this bunch being so polite. I turn to Penelope, sitting next to be on an antique loveseat. "You're not worried about being poisoned? Or scalded?"

"I'll worry after I have my tea," she replies.
***

Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell. Or, three Brits become lost and confused in the United States. The narrator here is American.

“And as soon as they come home, this is where they want to be, with a nice warm scone, and a cup of tea, and someone to kiss them kindly on the head.”

Let’s Go Home by Cynthia Rylant

"Nobody likes tea, you just get used to it."

Ford Prefect, Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

>20 TeaBag88: That's how I feel about coffee. :)

From A Conspiracy of Friends by Alexander McCall Smith:

“He stopped pacing. His situation was not as bad as Lord Lucan’s. He had done nothing wrong. He had broken no laws, and had not even encouraged Maggie in any way. He had behaved with complete propriety throughout and had nothing to reproach himself for. So what he should do, he decided, was to take a deep breath and do what the British always do in the face of crises: put the kettle on for tea. That was what they did when they heard the Spanish Armada was heading their way: they had tea. That was what they did when they realized that the Luftwaffe was droning towards them; those pictures of the pilots sitting on the grass in front of Spitfires — what were they doing? They were drinking tea.”

Jane Austen’s tea drinking not under ‘interrogation’, says museum (Guardian)

Staff at the museum Jane Austen’s House are reassuring fans of the Pride and Prejudice author that they have never and will never “interrogate Jane Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea”. The museum issued the statement on Tuesday, after the Telegraph reported that Austen’s tea drinking would “face ‘historical interrogation’” by the museum over the author’s family’s links to slavery...

Everett is imagining a dinner he has skipped, out of jealousy:

Again Rose Mary was pouring the Senator’s second cup and stirring in the cream. If she had lifted the spoon to her lips, as she always did with Uncle Tucker’s and sometimes forgot and did with his, Everett would have ——-

Rose of Old Harpeth

Later, as she lay in bed and contemplated what she had done, Mma Ramotswe thought: it was the tea that did it. It was the tea that had made her say what she said. It was the tea. But she had never once regretted what she had done under the influence of tea, and would not start doing so now.

To the Land of Long Lost Friends

I haven't read this one yet, but a friend clipped and forwarded the quote because she knew I'd love it!

>25 gmathis:

The Mma Ramotswe books are superb!

>25 gmathis: 🥰🥰🥰

>26 John5918: I have read them all up to The House of Unexpected Sisters, so that leaves me several behind. Agreed. They're delicious.