Wedding Books in Order

Katie Fforde returns to weddings again and again, and the books gathered under this banner show how many different directions she can take that simple idea. Some are firmly contemporary, while others step back into the 1960s, but they all circle around questions of love, timing and how much of yourself to lose in the name of a big day.

In Wedding Season we meet Sarah, a hardworking wedding planner who secretly doesn’t believe in love. She agrees to organise two very different ceremonies on the same summer day – one for a demanding celebrity and one for her own sister, with a tiny budget and huge expectations. With dress designer Elsa and hairdresser Bron at her side, Sarah rushes between fittings, family drama and last-minute disasters, discovering that it’s harder to stay detached when the people closest to you are walking down the aisle.

A Vintage Wedding shifts the focus to a small Cotswold town, where Beth, Lindy and Rachel meet at a lacklustre village-hall meeting and quickly become friends. One is a recent graduate running from a controlling mother, one is a single mum and gifted seamstress, and one is a meticulous accountant who likes life – and her house – just so. Together they launch a budget wedding-planning business, spruce up the tired hall and start staging homemade but heartfelt celebrations, even as their own love lives begin to change in ways none of them expected.

More recently Fforde has been exploring weddings in a different era. A Wedding in the Country opens in 1963, with Lizzie arriving in London for a cookery course that’s meant to make her marriage material for a “Suitable Man”. Instead she cuts her hair, moves into a slightly crumbling Belgravia house with two new friends and tastes the freedom of a city that’s just beginning to swing, all while falling for someone who appears to be promised elsewhere.

In A Wedding in Provence, readers follow Alexandra, one of Lizzie’s friends, to a chateau in the south of France. It’s late summer 1963, and Alexandra has been hired to look after three prickly children and help in the kitchen. The real challenge turns out to be their father, a reserved French count who upends her ideas about class, language and what a sensible future might look like. Sunshine, family secrets and cross‑Channel misunderstandings give this book a very different flavour from the Cotswold stories while keeping the same gentle stakes.

One Enchanted Evening continues the 1960s thread, this time focusing on Meg, an ambitious cook who wants to work professionally in an era when restaurant kitchens are still hostile to women. When her mother begs her to help rescue a slightly faded Dorset hotel before an important banquet, Meg finds herself battling both outdated menus and Justin, the owner’s determined son, whose old‑fashioned views collide with her hunger for change. Kitchens, banqueting rooms and rehearsal dinners stand in for churches here, but the book still revolves around celebration, partnership and choosing the life you actually want.

Taken together, these novels show weddings from every angle: as a business, as a family battleground and as a turning point for the people standing just off stage holding clipboards, bouquets or trays of canapés. You can read each book on its own, but following the 1960s stories in order – A Wedding in the Country, A Wedding in Provence, One Enchanted Evening and then From London with Love, which follows grown‑up Felicity as she finds love and purpose in Swinging London – gives you a satisfying sense of watching one generation grow up together.

However you dip in, the Wedding books promise warm friendships, behind‑the‑scenes glimpses of planning and plenty of chances for second thoughts, last‑minute nerves and well‑earned happy endings.