When over 33,000 publishing professionals and book lovers walk through the same doors, you know the books on display matter. Studio of Books was proud to bring such masterpieces at the much-anticipated 2026 London Book Fair.
“The Last of the Red Hot Lovers” by Ethel Ann Shaffer stepped onto the international stage at the 2026 London Book Fair, held 10–12 March at Olympia, London. This year, the book fair welcomed 1,005 exhibitors and more than 33,000 visitors.
The London Book Fair (LBF) is one of the most prestigious events in the publishing world, uniting authors, publishers, literary agents, and industry professionals from over 100 countries. Far beyond a traditional book fair, it is a global marketplace for the sale and distribution of content across print, audio, film, and digital media — where deals are made, voices are amplified, and new stories find their readers.
This is where authors meet publishers, literary agents pitch to foreign buyers, and book lovers discover their next great read. It is, above all, where ideas become movements.
Their first kiss happened at a tenth birthday party. Their last chapter began at eighty. And in between — sixty-two years, two separate lives, and a love that refused to stay buried.
The Last of the Red Hot Lovers is the warm, honest, and utterly disarming memoir of Eva and Kurt — childhood sweethearts who went their separate ways after high school, built full lives with other people, and then, more than six decades later, found their way back to each other.
Eva, a retired paralegal. Kurt, a retired Air Force Major. Both widowed. Both, by most conventional measures, supposed to be done with that kind of love.
They were not even close.
With a candor that is as refreshing as it is rare, this memoir captures the full, unguarded experience of falling in love at eighty — the tenderness, the desire, the laughter, and the vulnerability of two people rediscovering each other in bodies that have lived long and full lives. It answers the questions most books on aging are too polite to ask: Is love still this alive at eighty? Do the feelings — all of them — still show up?
For Eva and Kurt, the answer is an emphatic yes.
But their story is not without its heartbreak. Kurt’s adult children refuse to accept Eva, casting a long shadow over a love that deserves only light. It is a complication that is painfully real — and handled here with the same honesty that runs through every page.
The Last of the Red Hot Lovers is proof that the heart does not retire. It simply waits for the right moment to remind you what it is capable of.
