📚🚶Introducing our first book of 2025
Discover Tales from Firozsha Baag by Rohinton Mistry & get ready for a year of reading well
Dear walking book clubbers,
Welcome to 2025! And to the many of you who signed up over the past few weeks welcome to Emily’s Walking Book Club - thanks so much for joining us.
In our first newsletter of the year, you’ll find:
Details of our January events, including links to book tickets.
Discussion points to get you thinking about Tales from Firozsha Baag.
Links to read and listen on.
News of February - tickets are now on sale.
We are meeting NEXT Friday 17th, Sunday 19th and Monday 20th - so you still have time to read this collection of 11 short stories beforehand (it might be helpful and rather neat to portion them out to one story a day).
First, let me tell you a little bit about the book club, and about me…
About Emily’s Walking Book Club
I began Emily’s Walking Book Club in 2012, when I was a bookseller at Daunt Books. The Hampstead Daunt’s is just next to the Heath and I had this thought: what would happen if we could somehow take the books outside, and walk across Hampstead Heath while talking about them? And so the book club began (you can read more about its early days in THIS piece I wrote about it for the Spectator).
The logistics of young children made bookselling incredibly difficult for me and I moved into freelance arts journalism but kept on with the walking book club. In those years I often had a baby strapped on to me on the walks (as in the old pic above). Before leaving Daunt’s I founded the Daunt Books literary festival, which takes place every spring in Daunt’s Marylebone. It’s still going strong, and I’m so glad that the walking book club still has a regular spot in its brilliant programme every year (hence the earlier start time for our March Regent’s Park walk - see below).
During the Pandemic, Emily’s walking book club morphed into Emily’s Zoom Book Club. I was amazed to see so many familiar faces in the on-screen rectangles, many of whom had moved away from London over the years and were glad to reconnect. When we could go back to meeting in person we did (remember those days of social distancing?), but I kept up with the Zooms - and our Zoom book club on Monday evenings is still a great chance to discuss the book if you can’t make it along to our walks, not least because you might be living nowhere near London. A quarter of subscribers to this newsletter live in the USA, and I’m amazed to see that we have subscribers in 76 countries.
Our numbers have swelled over the years, from a handful of walkers to now reaching over 3,000, and as the Hampstead walks began to get a little unwieldy, last year I began hosting regular Friday lunchtime walks in Regent’s Park as well. In case you are curious about how many people come to our events:
Our Friday Regent’s Park walks tend to have 10-30 people
Our Sunday Hampstead Heath walks tend to have 30-50 people
Our Monday evening Zooms tend to have 8-15 people.
I’m thrilled that our book clubbers come from all walks of life, and range in age from 20s to 80s. Strangely, we have very few men. Everyone is extremely friendly and welcoming, open and helpful to one another.
I firmly believe that books are for everyone, which brings me on to pricing:
I need to be paid for my time, but I also want to keep this book club open to as broad a range of people as possible, so I’ve settled on a policy of asking you to use your own judgement when it comes to paying, both for this weekly newsletter and for our meet ups. Essentially, if you can afford to pay for this newsletter (£20/year, or £50/year to include a bespoke reading consultation with me), and if you can afford to pay on the upper end of the sliding scale for events, then please do. It’s a way of paying it forward for members who can’t afford to contribute as much financially. Thank you. If you can’t afford to pay as much - or indeed at all - don’t worry, you’re still really welcome to the community.
For those who are interested in my other work: after several years’ of freelance arts journalism for publications like the Spectator, FT and Guardian (you can find links to some HERE, I am now focussing on Bookbanks, a charity I founded last year that brings books to food banks. The charity works closely with food banks, bringing in books and book professionals to create spaces for conversation, inspiration and community while people get their food parcels. You can find out more HERE. I also do bits of other book-related work, such as hosting author events, the occasional book review or piece of journalism, and I also helped to organise last year’s wonderful Persephone Books Festival. Inevitably, I’m always trying and failing to find time to work on my own book …
So hello! I’m looking forward to getting to know you over the coming year. And old-timers, thank you so much for sticking by me over the years. Your ongoing support means the world.
Our January Tales from Firozsha Baag events
Please note that for the benefit of your fellow walkers, you need to have read the book before coming along to a walking book club. If you’ve not read the book, you are very welcome to join the zoom instead.
Emily’s Regent’s Park Walking Book Club: Friday 17th January 12-1.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-20
Emily’s Hampstead Heath Walking Book Club: Sunday 19th January, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-20
Emily’s Zoom Book Club: Monday 20th January, 8-9pm, £1-15
Buy Tales from Firozsha Baag from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in Emily’s Walking Book Club if you’re buying it in the shop.
Introduction & Discussion Points
Funny, compassionate, transporting and revealing, these eleven interlinked short stories detail the day-to-day life of a Parsi community in an apartment building in 1960s-70s Bombay. In a beautiful mosaic of seemingly ordinary lives, we get to know some colourful characters, while Mistry explores tensions of tradition and modernity, home and diaspora. This intriguing collection of stories, first published in 1987, was the Canadian-Indian author’s debut, before he went on to write three prize-winning novels, including A Fine Balance.
Long stories
I don’t usually choose short stories - how did you get on with this form as opposed to a novel or narrative non-fiction? I chose Tales from Firozsha Baag in part because they are on the longer side of short stories and also because I love the way they link together, with characters resurfacing in different stories to form a picture of the whole community. What did you make of this interlinking? Did you find it confusing keeping track of different characters, or did you enjoy the bigger picture that was created through smaller scenes? Did you notice a feeling of progression through the book? And were there any stories that you felt were particularly strong, or a little weak?
‘I think he misses his home…
… and us and everything he left behind, because if he likes it over there why would he not write stories about that…’ What do you think of the Mother’s thoughts in the final story, ‘Swimming Lessons’? Why does Mistry set his stories almost entirely in Bombay, when he himself moved to Canada? And what do you think his perspective from Canada brings to the writing? Have you read any other works of emigre writing? If so, how does this compare?
New vocabulary
Not unlike our recent pick Half of a Yellow Sun, this book is peppered with italicised words that aren’t in English: gunga, dugli, choli, Bawa, Dustoor, Bai, Kaun hai?, bhoot … How did you find the experience of having non-English words mixed into the text? Did it help you gain a better understanding of the local culture, or did it make you feel ostracised from it? Did you feel you were absorbing more of the atmosphere or did you have to keep on interrupting your reading to look things up?
These are just a few starting points to get you thinking. Look out for next week’s newsletter for my webcast introducing (and reading from) this absorbing collection of stories, and I’m looking forward to sharing many more thoughts with you at our meet ups after that!
Discover more about Rohinton Mistry
THIS fascinating profile of Rohinton Mistry by Angela Lambert in the Guardian is a great place to begin.
HERE is a great interview with the author for the Asia Society. I was intrigued to read about how he wrote the short stories that became Tales from Firozsha Baag.
It’s interesting to compare THIS enthusiastic review by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times with THIS more ambivalent piece by Nissim Ezekiel in India Today.
You can listen to Mistry talk about Bombay and the Parsi community on the BBC World Service’s Meridian, HERE.
Finally, if you enjoy Mistry’s stories, I highly recommend going on to his immensely long and absolutely wonderful novel A Fine Balance.
February *** tickets now on sale ***
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Megan Backus
Kitchen juxtaposes two tales about grief and love, loss and resilience in 1980s Japan. Each is emotionally piercing, while also offering a fascinating insight into a different culture. Kitchen was an instant bestseller when published in Japan in 1988 and then translated into English in 1993, putting it at the vanguard of today’s vogue for Japanese fiction.
Keen to know more? Do read THIS insightful review in the LRB by Penelope Fitzgerald (who is, of course our March author!).
In Regent’s Park: Friday 14th February, 12-1.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-£20
On Hampstead Heath: Sunday 16th February, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-£20
On Zoom: Monday 17th February, 8-9pm, £1-£15
Buy Kitchen from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in Emily’s Walking Book Club if you’re buying it in the shop.
You can find details of ALL our Spring books and events here:
Finally, if you would like to book on to three of our four Regent’s Park walks, you can do so here. (This is minus the March Human Voices walk, which will go on sale via Daunt Books as part of their Festival.)
If you would like to book on to all four of our Hampstead Heath walks, you can do so here:
Happy reading,
Emily