Author: Marina Lewycka
Publisher/Year: Penguin, 2005
Synopsis: Set in Peterborough, 84-year old Ukranian immigrant Nikolai Mayevskyj announces to his daughters that he's in love and will remarry. The object of his affection is Valentina, a 36-year old Ukranian woman with a visa about to expire and a pair of marvelous breasts. She's determined to use Nikolai to achieve the Western lifestyle she's assured she deserves, and he's willing to let her while he works on his book about the history of tractors. Meanwhile, his daughters, although markedly different in outlook and lifetime rivals, band together to thwart Valentina's ambitions. Valentina's turns their family home inside out, digging up old family secrets in the process. It's a battle of wills with all the participants shaped by their own pasts through recent Eastern European history.
What Others Have To Say
The San Francisco Gate
"Lewycka is a natural writer, a humorist with a light touch who draws the reader in to a family feud that is utterly funny but also stricken with plaintive sadness over the effects of war and inequity on human relationships."
The Guardian
"Reading this novel gave me the impression that I had read a school textbook on Ukrainian history with one eye on an episode of Coronation Street."
Houston Chronicle
"Though well-intentioned, the brief passages of tractor history bring the story to a standstill. Lewycka wants us to mull over the idea that the same ingenious minds that could construct peaceful agricultural machines could convert them into tanks for war."
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