When their recently widowed father announces he plans to remarry, sisters Vera and
Nadezhda realise they must put aside
a lifetime of feuding in order to save him. His new love
is a voluptuous gold-digger from the Ukraine half his age, with a proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, who stops at nothing in her single-minded pursuit of
the luxurious Western lifestyle she
dreams of. But the old man, too, is pursuing his eccentric dreams - and writing a
history of tractors in Ukranian.
Set in the suburbs of Peterborough , this is an amusing yet touching tale of an old man
yearning for a lost youth, and trying to recover it with the help of the most unsuitable trollop
ever to have entered the UK from Eastern Europe . Readable, with effort, this book will keep
the reader who is looking for something quite different well amused. Cleverly written with
some believable characters, Marina Lewycka''''s book was rightly shortlisted for the Orange
Prize 2005 and was the winner of the SAGA Award for Wit 2005.