I love the way this memoir is two stories. It is both a recording of a family and a testimony of a habit. Firstly, the story of Andrew’s family takes us from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Australia. This is a story full of baffling and baffled characters. Riemer records both great times and times of poverty: from his great-grandfather David, who saw his family’s fortunes disappear, to his mother, who kept her family together through World War II.

Andrew’s family survived without losing their sense of history and ritual. This brings me to the second story – the one about smoking – the habit and the consequences for Andrew and his family. Here we learn, as we all know, that ritual (whether it is the first cigarette of the day or not), is in the end what keeps families together. A Family History of Smoking is a beautifully written personal documentation of that ritual. A moving tribute to the ties that bind us.