Book Choices for Late Summer 2025

We will meet on Thursday 23rd July, 8pm at The Ash Tree, Ashendon to discuss The Old Ways by Robert McFarlane.

Here are the choices for our next read:

The Silence of Schererozade by Defne Suman

Set in the ancient city of Smyrna, this powerful novel follows the intertwining fates of four families as their peaceful city is ripped apart by the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

On an orange-tinted evening in September 1905, Scheherazade is born to an opium-dazed mother in the ancient city of Smyrna. At the very same moment, a dashing Indian spy arrives in the harbour with a secret mission from the British Empire. He sails in to golden-hued spires and minarets, scents of fig and sycamore, and the cries of street hawkers selling their wares. When he leaves, seventeen years later, it will be to the heavy smell of kerosene and smoke as the city, and its people, are engulfed in flames.

But let us not rush, for much will happen between then and now. Birth, death, romance and grief are all to come as these peaceful, cosmopolitan streets are used as bargaining chips in the wake of the First World War.

Told through the intertwining fates of a Levantine, a Greek, a Turkish and an Armenian family, this unforgettable novel reveals a city, and a culture, now lost to time.

A Chip Shop in Poznań – My Unlikely Year in Poland by Ben Atkin

A Chip Shop in Poznań is author Ben Aitken’s memoir of his time working in a fish and chip shop in Poznań. Part memoir, part travelogue, A Chip Shop balances personal musings on love, attraction, and camaraderie, with heartfelt cultural impressions.

Not many Brits move to Poland to work in a fish and chip shop. Fewer still come back wanting to be a Member of the European Parliament. 

Ben Aitken moved to Poland in 2016 to understand why the Poles were leaving. He booked the cheapest flight he could find, to a place he had never heard of - Poznan. This candid, funny and off-beat book is the account of his year in Poland, as an unlikely immigrant. 

Between peeling potatoes and boning fish, Ben spent time on the road travelling the country. He missed the bus to Auschwitz; stayed with a dozen nuns near Krakow; was offered a job by a Eurosceptic farmer and went to Gdansk to learn how communism got the chop. This is a bittersweet portrait of an unsung country, challenging stereotypes that Poland is a grey, ex-soviet land, and revealing a diverse country, rightfully proud of its colourful identity.

Ben Aitken was born under Thatcher, grew to 6ft then stopped, and is an Aquarius. He was conceived by a nurse and a shipwright, grew up in Portsmouth and was in a boyband for a spell in the noughties, then worked as a carer throughout his twenties. 

Ben writes for The Guardian and The Times, was the TCG Travel Journalist of the Year in 2024, and is an occasional lecturer at the University of Portsmouth.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being tells the story of a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanising and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover.

This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles, to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers.