The Tea House on Mulberry Street

by Sharon Owens Narrated by Caroline Winterson

Overview

Muldoon's Tea Rooms, beloved for the cozy atmosphere and luscious desserts, has started looking a bit outdated-and the same could be said about the proprietors, Penny and Daniel Stanley.

After seventeen years, their marriage has started to fade and wear a little thin, even as their old shop bustles with the energy of the customers who seek refuge from their particular dilemmas: Housewife Sadie Smith comes to escape her diet and her husband's stick-thin mistress. Struggling artist Brenda Brown sits and pens love letters to the actor Nicolas Cage. And Clare Fitzgerald returns after twenty years abroad to search for a long-lost someone.

Behind the cherry cheesecakes, vanilla ice creams, and chocolate cappuccinos are the stirrings of a revolution that will define lives, heal troubled hearts, and rock the very foundation of the humble teahouse. And through it all, Penny and Daniel manage to discover what truly matters in life and love. Rich with wit, bursting with charm, The Tea House On Mulberry Street is a vibrant debut of tenderness, imagination-and delicious pastries.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

Owens made bestsellerdom in Ireland with this debut that intertwines the stories of the various customers of a small Belfast restaurant/cafe. Daniel and Penny Stanley run Muldoon's, which had belonged to Penny's parents. A cast of regular-and occasional-patrons frequent Muldoon's for breakfast, lunch, and baked specialties, in particular the cherry cheesecake (recipe included). Brenda Brown, an eccentric young artist whose flat is next door to the restaurant, writes fan letters to Nicholas Cage and paints art that doesn't sell. Bookstore owner Henry Blackstock, partial to Muldoon's breakfasts, allows his wife to destroy his beloved garden so she can build a conservatory for her literary club. Ample Sadie Smith, who breaks her frequent diets at Muldoon's, suspects that her husband, the builder of the Blackstock conservatory, is cheating on her while she tirelessly cares for his aging parents. Clare Fitzgerald, a publishing executive in New York who lived in Brenda's flat as a student, met the love of her life at Muldoon's, lost contact through a freak accident (shades of An Affair to Remember) and has returned to search for him. At the center, Daniel and Penny are in a marital crisis that threatens the future of both their marriage and their restaurant. Miserly Daniel refuses to have children and cares only about the business. Penny, emotionally exhausted, begins an affair with a customer, a real-estate agent who inadvertently drops a bombshell about Daniel's past. Meanwhile, Henry falls in love with the recently divorced florist across the street; Sadie catches her swinish husband in bed with his skinny mistress, who used to be Brenda's boss; Clare buys a painting from Brenda, whose flatthen burns up in a fire that also destroys Muldoon's; and Daniel saves Penny and realizes that, although he married her for the restaurant, he does love her . . . . A sugar-and-spice toy for Maeve Binchy fans. First printing of 100,000

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169164244
Publisher:	Listen & Live Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	04/11/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Tea House on Mulberry Street

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By Sharon Owens

Putnam Adult

ISBN: 0-399-15265-2

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Chapter One

Daniel Stanley came hurrying down the stairs from the first-floor flat, and flicked on the lights in the tea house. The room was cold, and he shivered as he crossed the floor of the shop, and pulled open the blinds. The sky was still dark.

It would be another couple of hours, at least, before sunrise. He hurried around the cafe, switching on the small yellow table lamps, and the room was suddenly filled with a warm glow. For a brief moment, the old place looked almost cheerful. The dusty curtains, the faded linoleum, the cracked furniture and the flaking walls were bathed in a golden light.

Daniel peered at himself in a small mirror beside the door. His eyes were large, blue and intelligent-looking, with worry lines settling in around the edges. Well, that was understandable: running a small business was not easy. He was winter-pale, and he needed a haircut. But the fine bone structure he had inherited from his mother - the straight nose and high cheekbones - was still evident while other men's faces had softened and blurred as they filled out into middle-age. Yes, even at forty-seven, he was still passable, in a neat and tidy sort of way.

He opened the front door and carried in the day's delivery of milk. He began to switch on the appliances in the kitchen: the toaster, the water-heater, the old oven that still worked perfectly although it made a rattling noise when the temperature exceeded 200 degrees. He filled the kettle and switched it on. He looked at his watch. It was half past six. The ancient central heating system rumbled into life, then, and Daniel breathed a sigh of relief that it was still working.

While he waited for the kettle to boil, he wandered back to the front window of the shop and surveyed the comings and goings on Mulberry Street.

The city was waking up.

Lorry-drivers were already moving along the Lisburn Road with their deliveries. At half past seven, the early commuters would appear. Daniel watched a lorry-driver waiting patiently for the green light, tapping his fingers on the dashboard. He seemed to be listening to a song on the radio, too distracted to toot his horn when the car at the front of the line moved off too slowly. Daniel rarely played music in the cafe. He liked the peace of the early morning, and the familiar sounds of the kitchen. The silence helped him to concentrate on his cooking. Today, he would bake a luscious cherry cheesecake, and a moist coffee cake with toffee-coloured cream piped around the edges.

Across the road, the willowy florist with red hair was arranging a selection of white flowers in the freshly polished bay window of her shop. She handled the stems gently, almost with love, trailing her slender fingers through lush green leaves that were still wet with dew. Her name was Rose. Daniel could not have guessed but she had chosen white flowers that day as a kind of memorial, to mark the end of her short marriage to John. She was single again, and all alone in the city that locals called The Big Smoke. She surveyed the orderly show of ghostly blooms and then, satisfied, filled the kettle to make a cup of tea. Since leaving her husband, she'd been waking up earlier than usual, but the shop had never looked better.

Daniel watched from his cafe her leisurely progress, thinking what an easy job it must be to sell flowers: no lightning hygiene inspections to worry about, and no risk of poisoning the customers either. Red roses for Valentine's Day, fir-trees for Christmas, and nothing else to do all year except potter about, arranging steel buckets in the window. Yes, a real soft number. Although the smart, metal containers looked well, he admitted. Rose always put on a good display. They acknowledged each other with a nod, sometimes, when Rose came into the tea house for a sandwich at lunch-time.

Lunch-time! Daniel was awakened from his daydream of an easy life as a florist, and remembered all the work that had to be done before the first customers of the day arrived. And when there was work to be done, he thought of Penny. It was time to make the first pot of tea of the day. He hurried back to the kitchen.

He flicked open the lid of a little steel teapot and added one tea bag and a tiny deluge of boiling water from the kettle. The water-heater gave off a puff of steam at that moment and it startled him a little, as it always did.

'Are you there. Penny?' he called. 'Tea's in the pot! Hurry up!'

'I'm up,' said his wife, slowly descending the creaking stairs. 'What's the rush? We've over an hour, yet, before opening.'

She was wearing a long white dress and cardigan, pretty blue shoes, a gold-coloured belt with decorative coins on it and big hoop earrings, not to mention full make-up and sparkling, butterfly hair-clips. That was Penny, always holding things up with her little bit of glamour.

'What do you think?' she said, giving a little twirl. 'Do you think the butterflies suit me? They're new.'

'Very nice,' he said gently. 'Not a very practical outfit for working in, of course, but nice, yes.'

'We'll have to take down the Christmas decorations, tomorrow,' she said. 'I'll really miss them.' She straightened up some tinsel on the tree.

'The food won't make itself,' he reminded her, gravely. 'Oven's on.'

'We'll get it made in time. Don't we always?'

'I suppose so ... What kind of muffins do you fancy for today? Blueberry? Chocolate? They're still popular with the office people. For the time being, at least.' He was checking the containers on the counter.

'What about banana muffins, for a change? Where's that American flag? I'll stick it in the window and we'll have a Coffee-and-Muffin promotion.'

She found the flag at the back of the storeroom and crossed the shop, yawning, to hang it in place. Daniel told her his baking plans for the day, and Penny wrote it all down in coloured chalks on the blackboard and set it out on the footpath. Then she sat down at a small table and gazed out at the few people going past the window at that early hour. She waved at the florist across the road. Rose was dragging a large topiary tree across the floor.

'Rose is up and about, already,' she said. 'Have you noticed she's been doing that a lot recently? She's changing the window-display, I see. It looks nice, don't you think?'

'Mmmm,' said Daniel, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Penny had a hankering for pretty things and he didn't like to encourage her.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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