Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #89 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-05
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Synopsis
A field of strawberries in Kent ... And sitting in it two caravans - one for the men and one for the women. The residents are from all over: miner's son Andriy is from the old Ukraine, while sexy young Irina is from the new: they eye each other warily. There are the Poles Tomasz and Yola, two Chinese girls and Emanuel from Malawi. They're all here to pick strawberries in England's green and pleasant land. But these days England's not so pleasant for immigrants. Not with Russian gangster-wannabes like Vulk, who's taken a shine to Irina and thinks kidnapping is a wooing strategy. And so Andriy - who really doesn't fancy Irina, honest - must set off in search of that girl he's not in love with.

From the Back Cover
`Her last book was entertaining, but this one is better...Very buoyant, witty and informative' The Sunday Times

`A great romp...with considerable heart and winsomeness' Literary Review

`Another black comedy masterpiece...an extraordinary, surprisingly funny tale' Easy Living

'Lewycka's heartfelt and funny novel packs as big a punch as any hard-hitting political polemic' Daily Mail

`Another winner from the author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian' Woman and Home

`Marina Lewycka has pulled off another story with a big heart' Daily Express

`Lewycka's heartfelt and funny novel packs as big a punch as any hard-hitting political polemic' Daily Mail

`An extremely funny book' Times Literary Supplement

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 is married, with a grown-up daughter, and lives in Sheffield.

Customer Reviews

Two Caravans
The story is about Eastern European Immigrants coming to the UK to work as strawberry pickers and follows their story. There are some gruesome details about their work on a chicken farm - which may actually put me off eating chicken for life! It is amusing in parts but I preferred the "Ukranian Tractor".

The ordeals of immigrant casual workers
Marina Lewycka continues to mine the seam she opened up in A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, of immigrants (mainly from Eastern Europe, but also some from China and Africa) coming to Britain - this time to earn money picking strawberries, working on a chicken farm, in a restaurant etc. The book shows how these immigrant workers are exploited: passports confiscated by the crooked and violent agents (Eastern European themselves), miserable wages, diminished by extortionate deductions for all sorts of things, including for the rent of the most awful accommodation. Very often migrant workers also cheat compatriots who trust them, and the prejudices that citizens of one East European country have for those of a neighbouring country are also well brought out. Illegal migrants from outside the EU who pretend to be legal immigrants from EU countries (e.g. Brazilians claiming to be Portuguese) are particularly vulnerable, as the gang masters well know. There is a horrific description of the way chickens are treated in battery farms.

As in Tractors, the sombre nature of their ordeals is `lightened' by humour, though I didn't think the book was nearly as funny as the earlier book. There is again the hilariously fractured English spoken by some of the immigrants, though one of the girls, Irina, speaks remarkably good English. (She is the only character whose story is told in the first person.) The book focuses in turn on eight particular workers (and, very tediously, on the thoughts of a dog who follows them around), but the characterization is fairly shallow, certainly compared with the richness of the four central characters in Tractors. Being young, a lot of their thoughts are about sex (the naive Malawian, who had been educated by Catholic nuns, is eager to acquire canal - sic - knowledge; the letters he writes home to his sister are a lovely blend of high-flown language and delicious errors); and there is a stop-go love-story about bourgeois Irina from the anti-Russian Western Ukraine and working-class Andriy from the Donbas mining region in the pro-Russian Eastern Ukraine.

The novel also has some of the characteristics of a road movie, as the characters travel up and down England in vans or caravans and meet up with various English `characters'. Towards the end, in a rather attractive section, they fall in with a group of tree-hut-dwelling eco-warriors. Less credible are the number of occasions when, in different parts of England, they run into the same sinister exploiters.

Darkly humorous.
This is a darkly humorous book, at times extremely poignant, at others almost slapstick, about some immigrants arriving in England to create a better life for themselves. Instead, they find themselves working for some very dodgy employers, and living in a caravan picking strawberries for a low wage. The women live in the smallest caravan, the men in the other, and together they form a small community. In this tale Lewycka has created some wonderful characters - and I was delighted to bump into Mr Mayevskyj again, from her Short History of Tractors book. There are a lot of issues covered in this story, from immigrants, to prostitution to battery farming, yet they all link together wonderfully well and form a page turning novel. The character of Dog is pure genius and I loved hearing his `voice'. I also loved the way that Irena, one of the main characters, kept comparing her romance to the storyline in War & Peace. Apparently, Lewycka got some of her inspiration for this book from The Canterbury Tales. I can see the link quite clearly because Two Tractors is also a group of people travelling and telling their own tales. I thoroughly enjoyed every word of this novel and highly recommend it.