Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2005
294 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
With this wise, tender, and deeply funny novel, Marina Lewycka takes her place alongside Zadie Smith and Monica Ali as a writer who can capture the unchanging verities of family. When an elderly and newly widowed Ukrainian immigrant announces his intention to remarry, his daughters must set aside their longtime feud to thwart him. For their father's intended is a voluptuous old-country gold digger with a proclivity for green satin underwear and an appetite for the good life of the West. As the hostilities mount and family secrets spill out, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian combines sex, bitchiness, wit, and genuine warmth in its celebration of the pleasure of growing old disgracefully.
"'I had thought this story was going to be a knockabout farce, but now I see it is developing into a knockabout tragedy,' Nadezhda says at one point, and though she is referring to Valentina, she might also be describing this unusual and poignant novel." - Publishers Weekly.
"Drawing on her own family, Lewycka has created a funny, tender, and intelligent novel that is as much social history as family saga. It is a delight." - Booklist.
"Not enough here to reinvigorate an old, old story." - Kirkus Reviews.
"[T]he charming, poignantly funny first novel by Marina Lewycka, a daughter of Ukrainian immigrants." - The Washington Post.
"This novel of ruts and progress, ease and horror, assumption and suspicion, yields a golden harvest of family truths." - The Daily Telegraph.
"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. Nothing preachy here, just a boisterous meditation on the need to reconcile old and new Ukraine." - The San Francisco Chronicle.
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Marina Lewycka, the daughter of two Ukrainians who were taken to Germany as forced laborers by the Nazis, was born in a British-run refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, in 1946. Her family settled in the UK shortly after. She studied at Keele University in Staffordshire, and has written a number of books of practical advice for carers of the elderly, published by Age Concern. Described as funny, open and energized, she is a longtime resident of Sheffield, England where she used to lecture in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University. She is still attached to the University, but on a part-time basis.
Her first novel, The Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) was published when she was 58. It tells of the exploits of two feuding sisters trying to save their elderly ...
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