I have been reading The Golden Apple of Samarkand by Lala Wilbraham, a wonderful new book which has evaded the reviewers, perhaps because it is about the Polish aristocracy, a most unfashionable subject. Ostensibly, it tells the story of Lala’s family, the Tyszkiewicz, Catholic Poles from Lithuania, before and over the course of the 20th century, but in many ways it is about every family living in Central Europe and Eastern Europe at the time. 

The book interests me personally because my own family, Poles from Galicia, now Ukraine, lived through the same kind of hell as the Tyszkiewicz at the hands of the Russians and the Germans. Dead babies thrown from Siberia-bound trains; the 80-year-old woman clutching the photograph of her son who died aged 19 in Auschwitz; the alcoholic cousin, who did survive Siberia, but who can’t seem to get on in life – we all have the same stories, the same characters, the same reality.