Two feuding sisters join forces against their aged father's glamorous, gold-digging new girlfriend in Marina Lewycka’s hilarious debut novel.

Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must set 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. But the sisters’ campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers 50 years of Europe’s darkest history and sends them back to roots they’d much rather forget…
Longlisted
The Man Booker Prize 2005
Published by
Viking
Publication date

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Marina Lewycka

Marina Lewycka

About the Author

Legend has it that, on its publication, A Brief History of Tractors in Ukrainian was often placed in the agriculture or engineering sections of unsuspecting bookshops. In fact, of course, it is a comic novel that draws on Marina Lewycka’s own heritage.
More about Marina Lewycka