Elizabeth Mapp-Flint seeks to regain her status as the leader of Tilling society by holding a New Year's Eve party to which Lucia brings two unexpected and not entirely welcome guests, causing embarrassment, if not chaos. Elizabeth redoubles her social offensive by introducing an alternative to Tilling's traditional games of bridge, brought back from India many years before by her husband, Major Benjy.

Such a state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue, as Lucia offers a different form of entertainment, and battle between these two formidable hostesses commences.

A Tilling New Year tells the story of a slice of life in the Tilling of the Mapp and Lucia novels by E.F.Benson, and is written in sincere tribute to these comic but yet sympathetic portraits of middle-class society in England in the 1920s and 1930s. It is the fourth book in Hugh Ashton's Mapp and Lucia series, following Mapp at Fifty, Mapp's Return, and La Lucia, which have been enjoyed by fans of the original stories: