Between the Lines - A Long Italian Lunch w Nicky Pellegrino

Join us for a Long Italian Lunch with Nicky Pellegrino, best-selling author of delicious novels about Italy, friendship, passion and lots of food!

What better time to escape to the sun and olive groves of Italy, even if just for a couple of hours. Nicky, in conversation with our local literary darling Charity Norman, will no doubt keep us all laughing as she talks about her books – she has written 14 (plus a typically frank and humorous book on menopause) - including her just released novel PS Come to Italy.

After a wonderfully successful high tea at the Ongaonga Hall celebrating the flavours of India in 2022, this year the Between the Lines team are taking you to the Takapau Hall where we will share an Italian meal and a glass of vino or two!

Nicky Pellegrino was born in Liverpool but spent childhood summers staying with her family in southern Italy. A shy, tall, gingery child she never really fitted in with her exuberant Italian cousins and had a tendency to stay quiet and observe things. When Nicky started writing fiction it was her memories of those summers in Italy that came flooding back and flavoured her stories: the passions, the feuds but most of all the food.

Nicky now lives in Auckland, New Zealand with her husband Carne plus a menagerie of dogs and horses. She works as a freelance journalist and her novels are distributed in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, and have been translated into numerous languages.

She loves cooking for friends, drinking red wine, walking on New Zealand’s amazing beaches, riding her horse through the forest and lying in bed reading other people’s novels.

Charity is the author of six novels. She was born in Uganda, brought up in draughty vicarages in the North of England and met her husband under a truck in the Sahara desert. She worked for some years as a family and criminal barrister in York Chambers, until, realising that her three children barely knew her, she moved with her family to New Zealand. There she began to write.

What a treat! - a long Italian lunch in the gorgeous historic Takapau Hall while being entertained with stories from the marvellous Nicky Pellegrino in conversation with our own Charity Norman.