should be ashamed of herself!" To be honest, I didn't have a prior interest in tractors, and I hadn't intended to give them such a prominent

As a work of literature 'Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian' suffers from what is perhaps a typical fault of many at least partially autobiographical debut: too much crammed into little space, too many stories in one and not many of them very well explored. cook" with 'superior' breasts and a "genius" son, whose demands on the elderly man only begin at marriage. Family secrets are revealed, and the Despite that, I enjoyed this novel, and found it eminently readable, well flowing and colourful. It is moving at times, with passages of clear poetic beauty and scenes of wonderfully absurd farce. It's an easy and pleasant read; nothing demanding but not totally shallow. The language is well used, characters have their own idiom (always easier when non-native half-Englishness is involved, but still) and I found the 'Tractors' inserts (a monumental history of these machines being written by Nikolay Mayevsky) a nice device too. Tolstoy said "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" at the beginning of Anna Karenina.The novel won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize at the Hay literary festival, the Waverton Good Read Award 2005/6, and was short-listed for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction, losing to Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. Over a million copies have been sold in the UK. [2] The sisters are horrified. It seems completely clear to them that Valentina is just using their father to stay in the UK, and they are scandalized that all it took to bamboozle their supposedly brilliant father are some satin green underwear and a pretended knowledge of Nietzsche. However, we soon learn that while Valentina is indeed an opportunist, everything she does is for her son Stanislav, whose high IQ wasn’t well served in Ukrainian schools. Man, this book needed an editor, or at least one more (ruthless) revision. But it was nominated for the Booker, so what the hell do I know? What I do know, though, is this manuscript as is would never have made it out alive if presented to my writer's group.

There will be no problems, says Pappa. He has anticipated all problems. He has known her for three months. She has an uncle in Selby, and has come to visit him on a tourist visa. She wants to make a new life for herself and her son in the West, a good life, with good job, good money, nice car - abso lutely no Lada no Skoda - good education for son - must be Oxford Cambridge, nothing less. She is an educated woman, by the way. Has a diploma in pharmacy. She will easily find well-paid work here, once she learns English. In the meantime, he is helping her with her English, and she is cleaning the house and looking after him. She sits on his lap and allows him to fondle her breasts. They are happy together. I like how the characters are so rich and real. I really got mad against Valentina, but then increasingly conflicted as I realized that the protagonist's father was equally to blame for the insane situation described in the book. It makes you realize how complicated we are - how we can be brilliant in some areas of our lives and then complete idiots in others, without even noticing it, much to the detriment of our loved ones. document into the middle of your novel? How did you come up with the idea to have Nikolai write this treatise? Did you have a prior interest in tractors? home and garden, Along the way the two sisters confront differences that shadowed them have throughout their childhoods and Nadia learns for Your previous professional specialty has been elder care, and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian is immensely sympathetic toward Nikolai

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sisterhood at the end of the book and make some guesses about how it might continue to grow or evolve in the future. What kinds of grievances do This is the story of old Nikolai Mayevskyj (pronounced "Mayevski"), eccentric immigrant engineer from Ukraine who falls in love at the age of eighty-four with a sex-bomb, Valentina, who is thirty-six. Valentina has the only goal of finding domicile for herself and her "genius" son, Stanislav, in the UK: and the recently widowed engineer is an easy target. Nikolai's daughters Vera and Nadehzda (the first-person narrator) are appalled, and set about rescuing their father from this scheming vixen, burying their running feud about their mother's legacy temporarily. In the process, a lot of dirty family laundry is unearthed, a lot of distressing events take place, but true to the tradition of comic literature, things pan out in the end. How does Nadia's vocation as a sociologist influence her approach to her family and to Valentina? Does it help her see the situation more clearly

whims of his mother and other adults. Though he is no innocent, he is in some ways a victim. Return to some sections of the book that deal The other no-no that the author does is to somehow allow her lead first-person narrator to know what someone else is thinking. This is after the old man's young wife is treating him particularly bad:The narrator, forty-seven-year-old Nadezhda (Nadia for short) Mayevskij is a university lecturer in sociology in Peterborough, a small city east of London in England. fest, kétféle bevándorló van. Az egyik már bevándorolt, ott ül a jó ölmeleg Angliában, viszonylagos létbiztonságban, és már csak rossz emlék neki, hogy egykor olyan ország polgára volt, ami rendszerszinten falta fel gyermekeit. A másik viszont még csak most akar bevándorolni, a perifériáról áttenné székhelyét a centrumba, hogy ott zsákmányolják ki. Igen, akarja, hogy kizsákmányolják, szar melót lőcsöljenek rá, olyasmit, amit a született angol a világ minden pénzéért sem végezne el, csak annyit kíván, hogy mindez helyileg az álmok földjén, a kapitalizmus bölcsőjében történjen. És hogy ezt elérje, semmiféle piszkos trükktől nem riad vissza. her and why? What are some of the explanations that minor characters give for her behavior? Locate points in the book where people other than Nadia, Never before have I bought a book because of title alone. Plus, it was sandwiched between Nicholas Sparks ( ughhh!) and "Eat, Pray, Love" ( blerghhh!). I rescued it from this ghastly company and expected a grateful dose of funny in return. One of the wonderful things about writing is that the idea you start out with is not necessarily the one that gets written. The characters have