A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
"A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" was bestselling author Marina Lewycka's bestselling debut novel which has sold over one million copies worldwide. Lewycka tells the side-splittingly funny story of two feuding sisters, Vera and Nadezhda, who join forces against their father's new,...
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"A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" was bestselling author Marina Lewycka's bestselling debut novel which has sold over one million copies worldwide. Lewycka tells the side-splittingly funny story of two feuding sisters, Vera and Nadezhda, who join forces against their father's new, gold-digging girlfriend. '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 emigre 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 fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget... "It's rare to find a first novel that gets so much right...Lewycka is a seriously talented comic writer". ("Time Out"). "Hugely enjoyable ...yields a golden harvest of family truths". ("Daily Telegraph"). "Delightful, funny, touching". ("Spectator"). Bestselling author Marina Lewkyca has received great critical acclaim since the publication of her hilarious first novel "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" in 2005, which was the winner of the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction 2005, winner of the Saga Award for Wit 2005, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2005 and longlisted for the Booker prize 2005. Her other humorous novels "Two Caravans" (published as "Strawberry Fields" in the USA and Canada), "We Are All Made of Glue" and "Various Pets Alive and Dead" are also available from Penguin.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780241961827 (0241961823)
Publish date: March 1st 2012
Publisher: Fig Tree
Pages no: 336
Edition language: English
It was funny, admittedly, although not quite as hilarious as all the reviews made it out to be. I guess it just depends on your sense of humour. It took a little while for me to go into this, but once I had it was an enjoyable read - perfect for the holidays.
There is an episode in the comedy sitcom Mind Your Language, where Jeremy Brown's motley crew of students drawn from all over the world to learn English tell jokes to pass the time. Juan Cervantes, the Spanish bartender, tells a hilarious joke: at the end, he is in stitches, unable to stifle laught...
Ein gutes ukrainisch dramatisches Familienepos, in dem wirklich fast alle handelnden Personen derartig unsympatisch, gierig, kriminell, verschlagen, streitsüchtig, gewalttätig.... sind und sich auch für unseren Kulturkreis sehr "osteuopäisch" also kaum nachvollziehbar verhalten. Warum ich dennoch nu...
I thought this book was really funny and I chose it for book club. Everyone hated it but one and she liked it because she likes tractors. Recently, I met someone who enjoyed the humor and thought the book was a blast so I feel redeemed.
This was another one of my 'I really should have read this by now' books, and I'm glad I did.For the first 100 pages or so, I was surprised that this was a début novel as the prose flowed so well and the story was tight and consistent. After that though, it did begin to flounder and the inexperience...