Richmond Reads brings Louisa Young, Olia Hercules and a Silk Road storyteller to borough libraries This November

Three library events across Richmond upon Thames this November are, on paper, about three very different things: a beloved English family saga, the food of a country at war, and folk tales from a trade route that closed centuries ago. What actually connects them is simpler than that list suggests. Each one is about what people do with a story when something they love is at risk of disappearing. Taken together, the three evenings form the backbone of this year’s Richmond Reads, the borough’s autumn season of library events built around reading, storytelling and the authors behind both.

All three Richmond Reads events take place in council-run libraries rather than bookshops or theatres, which keeps ticket prices at £7 or £8 and puts literary conversation somewhere most Richmond residents already have a card for.

The clearest case is the Cazalet Chronicles. Elizabeth Jane Howard’s five novels, following the Cazalet family from the 1930s through the 1950s, ended with her final volume in 2013 and her death the following year. Her niece, Louisa Young, has since taken on the job of continuing the family’s story, and her first new instalment, The Golden Hours, carries the Cazalets into the 1960s. On Tuesday 3 November at 7pm, Young will be at Twickenham Library in conversation with the publicist and novelist Georgina Moore, talking through what it means to pick up a dead relative’s most-loved creation and keep it breathing. Tickets are £7.

Nine days later, the subject shifts from a fictional family to a real country. On Thursday 12 November at Richmond Lending Library, the chef and writer Olia Hercules joins the journalist Felicity Spector to talk about food, war and the business of staying yourself under bombardment. Hercules, who co-founded the #CookForUkraine fundraising campaign after the 2022 invasion, has just published Strong Roots, her account of her own Ukrainian family’s displacement.

Spector’s new book, Bread and War, grew out of her volunteering with a mobile bakery project supplying frontline villages where the ordinary infrastructure of eating has been destroyed. Between them, the two books make the same argument from different angles, that in a besieged country, deciding what to cook and who to feed is not a retreat from the war but a way of refusing to be defined only by it. The 7pm talk costs £7 and is followed by a signing in partnership with Hewson Books, The Kew Bookshop.

The third event pulls the timescale back much further. On Thursday 19 November at Ham Library, the storyteller Sarah Rundle will spend an evening spinning tales gathered along the ancient Silk Road, the network of trade routes that once carried goods, ideas and folklore between China and the Mediterranean.

Rundle’s repertoire for this kind of evening ranges across China, Mongolia, Uzbekistan and beyond, built from the same instinct that runs through her wider work: hunting out stories that would otherwise have gone unheard. The Silk Road itself stopped functioning as a trade corridor centuries ago, but the tales that travelled along it did not need the caravans to keep moving once they had lodged themselves in people’s memories. The 6pm event costs £8.

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