Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1659 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-02
• Released on: 2006-03-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Synopsis
'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.' Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of feuding to save their emigre engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth. But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget...

From the Inside Flap
"Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a
glamorous blonde Ukranian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was
thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade,
churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface sludge of sloughed-off
memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside."

From the Back Cover
Praise for A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRAINIAN: 'Outstanding' Daily Mail

'Extremely funny' The Times

'Nothing short of amazing' Daily Express

Customer Reviews

Trashy
Trashy, badly written, unexplored 1D characters, Overhyped.

As well crafted as this review.

Good but patchy
This is a strange novel. Old Ukrainian guy living in England falls for Ukrainian con-woman who wants the good life in the UK for herself and her son. Old guy's daughters are outraged because the woman is a slutty, slovenly blond who treats their father like dirt and has lovers on the side. Meanwhile, he is writing a history of tractors, chunks of which are thrown into the novel, together with flashbacks of what happened in wartime Eastern Europe. It's a somewhat disjointed novel. I admit to very quickly begin skipping all the stuff on the tractors and the wartime reminisces. As others have said they added nothing to the novel - or else I was missing something deep, although in this case it must have been buried very deep! I wound up thinking about the whole novel, 'Well what was the point of that?'
I didn't think the book was particularly funny. It didn't raise one smile.
However, I did find the modern day soap opera parts entertaining and they certainly held my interest and for me were enjoyable and the reason the book gets the 3 stars that it does. I liked the description of Valentina's eye colour as being like 'syrup' I could envisage it immediately. Indeed many of the descriptions were evocative and immediate. Sometimes the descriptions of the squalor were so strong that I found my nose wrinkling. That HAS to be good story telling!
Verdict. 3 stars for all the positive points and the two missing stars reflect the areas where I was less impressed.

Highly recommended
I bought this on a whim, and boy, how lucky was I? I really loved the book, and am reading it now, month after I bought it, for the second time, it is just as enjoyable!
Marina Lewycka's second book 'Two Caravans' is just as good btw.
Buy it, you will not regret it. :)