Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49403 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-29
• Binding: Hardcover
• 309 pages

Synopsis
In the idyll of the English countryside, on a beautiful summer's evening in a Kent field, and around their two caravans, a little group of strawberry pickers is getting ready to celebrate a birthday. But who picks our strawberries these days? The Ukrainians: Irina, just off the coach from Kiev, and eager to improve her excellent English and find true love with a romantic Englishman; Andriy, the miner's son from the other Ukraine; the Poles: Bob Dylan fan, Tomasz, (whose smelly trainers will soon punish those in the men's caravan), Yola, the petite, voluptuous gangmistress and her religious niece Marta, who finds the wild mushrooms to cook with the sliced loaf; then there is Vitaly, king of the new mobilfon world of the shiny new Eastern Europe; two Chinese girls; Emanuel, the round eyed eighteen-year-old from Malawi, come to England to look for his sister. And although he can't exactly help pick strawberries, there's also the Dog...But these are a group leading dangerous lives - exploitative employers, British regulations and gang masters with guns will all threaten their existence as they take to the caravan road until each of them peels off to find their destiny.

Hilarious, gritty, moving, and slapstick by turns, "Two Caravans" has every bit of the extraordinary distinctiveness and wit and heart that made "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" so successful.

From the Back Cover
`A great romp...with considerable heart and winsomeness'
Literary Review

`Heartfelt and funny...packs as big a punch as any hard-hitting political
polemic' Daily Mail

`Immensely appealing. All but sings with zest for life ... could hardly be
more engaging, shrewd and winningly perceptive' Sunday Times

`Hilarious and horrifying, Two Caravans is funny, clever and well-observed'
Guardian

About the Author
Marina Lewycka was born of Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, at the end of the war, and grew up in England. She teaches at Sheffield Hallam University. She is married, with a grown-up daughter, and lives in Sheffield.

Customer Reviews

Funny,dark, but very good....ENJOY!
If this is modern England told through the eyes of an Eastern european immigrant, we are in far more trouble than we realise. In fact I think this story is far closer to reality than many of us leading comfortable English lives would ever like to imagine. Yet for all those dark thoughts, this book is funny, well told, beautifully characterised, superbly observed, and truly a lovely story. Her first book "tractors" was a wonderful story, "caravans" is every bit as good, if not better. Enjoy! I did!

stay off the strawberries in future
Two Caravans is the tricky follow-up title to a first hit - how did she get on?

Well it's a fairly hair-raising read, I think. It's about a group of foreign strawberry pickers who've been trafficked to a really disgusting farm somewhere in Kent where they are being completely exploited by being charged loads for the rental of the two caravans where they live and for the lousy food the farmer supplies.

Things get even worse when the horrible lechy head trafficker decides he fancies Irina, the prettiest young Ukrainian. She flees him and his gun in the night, getting lost somewhere in the middle of huge fields in a genuinely tense passage.

But it's also got a kind of comic road trip theme, as the other pickers set off in the caravan to try to change their destiny in the UK back to what they'd hoped it might be before arriving. This sometimes turns out badly - they get fleeced at more than one point - and sometimes pretty well.

There are many things I could say about this book, but here's just two: 1) I've never read a book about the lives of people working such low-wage jobs before (maybe just articles in the Guardian) and it was eye-opening and good. 2) I'm never eating an English supermarket strawberry again.

Could have been great :(
This book could have been great.I was completely wowed until about half way through when, as other reviewers have mentioned, most of the main characters disappear. At this point the story becomes a overly drawn-out love story between two characters. I was left feeling that Lewycka had two novels to write and tried to squash them unsuccessfully into one. The first was the better novel, a study of immigrant life in the UK. There are some really fascinating and humorous parts to this novel - the views of the immigrants on their new surroundings, their impressions of each other, the exploitation of workers etc. and the part about chicken farming will stay with me forever. The second novel was about the meetings of old and new Ukraine in the characters of Irena and Andriy. Also potentially very interesting, but perhaps not a funny read. I feel very disappointed for Lewycka. She has a lovely, engaging writing style and has some very interesting ideas, but this novel just ends up an incoherent jumble of ideas. Don't even start me on the not-very-scary, may-turn-up-anywhere gangster baddie!!!