A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
SynopsisPlot
'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous 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 aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré 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.
Story
About this book
Marina Lewycka's debut novel opens with an eighty-four-year-old widower, a Ukrainian-born engineer living in England, who announces he plans to marry a thirty-six-year-old Ukrainian divorcee named Valentina. His two daughters, Vera and Nadezhda, have spent years at odds with each other, but the arrival of Valentina forces them into an uneasy alliance. Valentina is brash, determined, and openly pursuing a comfortable Western life, and the sisters set out to protect their father from what they see as a transparent scheme.
The story unfolds against a background of family history shaped by emigration and twentieth-century upheaval in Ukraine. As Vera and Nadezhda work together, long-buried tensions and memories surface between them, including disagreements rooted in their different experiences of displacement. Their father, meanwhile, occupies himself by writing a manuscript about the history of tractors in Ukrainian, a project that threads through the novel and connects his engineering past to his sense of identity.
Lewycka uses sharp, often physical comedy to carry the plot forward, setting domestic battles over green satin underwear, boil-in-the-bag meals, and immigration paperwork alongside quieter passages about aging, loyalty, and what family members owe each other across generations.
