Tea & Book Pairing - Eye, Gut, Throat, Bones
As part of our exclusive partnership with Orion Books, we’ve teamed up to bring you the very best Summer Tea & Book Pairings. Check back weekly for another fabulous book and Tea to try.
This week, we have ‘EYES, GUT, THROAT, BONES’ by Moira Fowley, paired with our Chamomile Tea.
Chamomile Blossoms – offer a calming brew to take the edge off this gripping and spooky collection of stories.
About the Book
Starting off with an evocative banger, Fowley sets the scene for a recurring theme in her short stories: not being listened to by the narrators' lovers and what that leads to.
About the Author
Moïra Fowley is the well-regarded author of three Young Adult novels, best known of which is The Accident Season. Eyes Guts Throat Bones is her first venture into stories for adults, which came about when she abandoned writing a fourth YA novel during the pandemic to bring, in her own words, something “bloody and beautiful” screaming into the world in a “horror-adjacent” mode
The first story, What Would You Give for a Treat Like Me, is a strong opener: a vivid, neatly executed post-apocalyptic road story with fairy-tale echoes.
The world has been taken over by forest and a wider spirit of transformation that has somehow been set loose by the coming together of the unnamed narrator and her partner Melissa.
A group of adults and children are driven forward by the need to survive. The party are consumed by sudden alteration into bullfrogs, bears, wolf cubs, rose bushes; into salt crystals or gingerbread that crumbles into sugary grains.
When the couple arrive, alone, at their destination, the lost children return in their mutated forms, two of them made of mud and mulch “smelling of damp dead things, earthworms in their ears and woodlice between their teeth, eyes still shining”. Melissa seems to have known this outcome all along. “Come in little children, [she] said. Come inside.”
About the Tea Pairing
Whole Chamomile Blossoms - Herbal Tea
With its soft golden blooms and full, floral aroma, our loose-leaf Whole Chamomile Blossoms herbal tea will leave you steeped in tranquillity.
Awarded two stars at the Great Taste Awards, this fragrant, bright yellow infusion owes its heavenly flavour to the quality of its flowers, which are grown on the fertile plains of Croatia, as they have been for thousands of years. (Chamomile was one of the first tisanes recorded, in an Ancient Egyptian papyrus dated to 1550 BC.)
Completely caffeine-free, this popular herbal tea isn't known as 'calming chamomile' for nothing. A delightfully relaxing drink at any time of day, it's best enjoyed in the evening – particularly after a meal. Add a dash of honey, or even a grating of ginger for an extra warming kick, if you like, and ease into its soothing embrace.
Harvested in spring, only the finest chamomile flowers are selected for this luxury tea, which has a delicious mellow sweetness and characteristic hints of apple. (Chamomile's name is rooted in the ancient Greek word meaning 'ground apple'. )
The plant itself is a member of the daisy family and the whole flowers are picked after they bloom, then dried, during which the white petals usually drop away, leaving the familiar fuzzy yellow head seen in high-quality chamomile tisanes.
