Romance Readers Evening with Ella Risbridger
Do you love, love? Can't stop reading about enemies-to-lovers? Then join us for a night of celebrating love in all its forms and meet new friends at the same time.
Hosted by our romance lead, Liv, you'll start the evening with a speed-mating session hosted in our cosy bookshop wine bar.
Your meet cute? You just need to bring a romance book recommendation for another reader.
Afterwards, you'll join Ella and Liv for a short talk about In Love With Love, and you'll explore what it means to be a romance reader in 2025.
Join us for a joyful evening of new friendships, stories you can't stop talking about and, of course, love.
💌 Every ticket includes your entry to the speed-mating event and a copy of In Love with Love, which Ella will sign and dedicate on the night. 💌
About In Love with Love
Smart, funny and passionate: An ode to a beloved genre and a brilliantly insightful piece of cultural criticism
Cowboys and aliens, dukes and dancers, power dynamics, death and domesticity, vampires and veterans, tradwives and single dads and sisters and small-town politics, private jets and princes and horses, hopes and dreams and fears, and so, so much kissing: this is a love letter to romantic fiction, but it's also a book about creativity and creation and the job of art in this crazy old world.
Why do we read? Why do we write? What makes some books last forever, and others vanish from memory? What is the point of everything, anything, when everything - especially romantic love - is so fleeting in the grand scheme of things? How do we love when the world is falling apart? And what does it mean that love is the one subject of which we never seem to tire?
Part literary criticism, part investigation, total passion project, In Love with Love is a wild tour from the very beginnings of kissing in books through historic trends, favourite tropes, beloved friends and brand-new loves, from Jane Austen to Jasmine Guillory, Jilly Cooper to Georgette Heyer, from the depths of the ocean to the furthest reaches of the outer galaxy . . .
About Ella Risbridger
Ella Risbridger is a writer and editor whose cookbooks, anthologies, children's books include The Year of Miracles, Set Me on Fire and The Secret Detectives. Midnight Chicken: & other recipes worth living for was Sunday Times Book of the Year 2019, Guild of Food Writers General Cookbook of the Year, and an Amazon bestseller in both hardback and paperback. She likes poems, cats and gardens.