A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Marina Lewycka

#1700 of 8,085 books · #533 in Crime & Thriller

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction (2005). Also longlisted for 1 other award.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. 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. 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.