Top

We have updated our Privacy Policy Please take a moment to review it. By continuing to use this site, you agree to the terms of our updated Privacy Policy.

My Turn to Make the Tea

On sale

7th July 2022

Price: £9.99

Select a format

Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349015996

Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.

INTRODUCED BY LISSA EVANS

‘I envy anyone yet to discover the joy of Monica Dickens. She’s beady eyed, big hearted and blissfully funny’ NINA STIBBE


‘Wherever her eye falls, it finds the exact, significant detail, and her ear for dialogue is unerring’ OBSERVER

‘Monica’s naked curiosity and general bolshiness are easy to identify with’ LISSA EVANS

Poppy, newly recruited cub reporter at the Downingham Post, is determined to prove to the editor that he’s wrong in his belief that ‘Women are a nuisance in the office’. He certainly doesn’t think she’s a nuisance when it’s time for the tea round – a job which never fails to fall to the only female reporter.

What Poppy lacks in experience, she makes up for in spirit and ambition. She’ll make the Downingham Post the best regional newspaper there is – even if she occasionally gets the names wrong in court hearings. Life for a single professional woman in the post-war years certainly has its challenges – from finding a room, when the tyrannical landlady doesn’t consider Poppy to be quite respectable to changing her editor’s deeply entrenched ways. This semi-autobiographical novel, recounted with Monica Dickens’s wit, warmth and wry observation will charm all who read it.

If you enjoyed My Turn to Make the Tea, you will love One Pair of Feet, Dickens’s novel of being a wartime trainee nurse, also published in Virago Modern Classics.

What's Inside

Read More Read Less

Reviews

Observer
Wherever her eye falls, it finds the exact, significant detail, and her ear for dialogue is unerring
Jacqui Howchin, Hunts Post
Monica Dickens is an author who needs to be rediscovered in a modern age
Lissa Evans
Monica's naked curiosity and general bolshiness are easy to identify with, and as a narrator she always tells us what we're longing to know - it's like listening to a friend's anecdote, and egging them on
John Betjeman
One of the most affectionate and humorous observers of the English scene, particularly of the pretensions of genteel suburban life, that we have. Not only this, but she can always tell a good story
Nina Stibbe
I envy anyone yet to discover the joy of Monica Dickens. She's beady eyed, big hearted and blissfully funny