This story is so neatly balanced between the humour and farce of the present "situation" and the scary, desperate past. I ultimately found it hard to warm to any of the characters but strangely felt like I wanted to keep reading. Valentina is ready for anything to obtain the coveted comforts of Western life that the Westerners take for granted. Our little exile family, held together by our mother's love and beetroot soup, has started to fall apart. And I was struck by how little this turbulent area of human relationships is represented in fiction.

it's not trying to be abstruse, it flows pretty decently, it took me relatively little time, and as a read was fairly enjoyable. This book is an entertaining read attempting a number of different messages and to a large extent pulling them off. Stanislaw is one of the more complex characters, in part because he is not in control of his own destiny but is instead subject to the whims of his mother and other adults. I’ve found that writing is a strange process—you don’t really know your characters at the outset of a book any more than the reader does. Olyan küzdelem ez, aminek egész egyszerűen nem lehetnek győztesei, Lewycka pedig kiválóan mutatja be ennek az egész mocskos adok-kapoknak a dinamikáját.Meet Nikolai, a retired Ukrainian engineer and tractor historian, and his daughters, Vera and Nadezhda, who haven’t spoken since the death of their mother. 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.

I did also notice quite a few instances when the first-person narrator suddenly became rather omniscient, giving us the emotions and feelings of the people she comes in contact with even though she has no way of actually knowing them.

As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families. Just when you think she’s the “slut” and “gold-digger” the eldest sister, Vera, is persuaded she is, the book also exposes the pathos and hardship that faces those who are displaced – through war, politics and Otherness. Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian , has sold more than a million copies in the UK alone and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Man Booker and won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction and the Waverton Good Read Award. As the story rolls along she's forever nudging your ribs and smirking loudly and huff-huffing at the silly things her characters do. All of which is true and important, but I'm really not seeing where the laughs are, which made this a slightly bewildering experience.

The other two seemed even more unlikely: one claimed to be from my father’s niece, the other from my mother’s sister. I was acutely aware of the difference between the way my parents saw themselves, as educated and professional people, and our actual circumstances, which were quite poor. Each of the characters indulges in uninhibited bad behavior—and bad language—and that’s what I most enjoyed writing about.Go back to scenes where Nadia reflects on her mother’s garden in particular, and contrast that with the way Valentina keeps house. Sometimes you'll read something so good (think John Irving in his prime) that it inspires you, and shows you just how transcending the written word can be.

Like Nadia, we’re drawn into her father’s alternating states of misery and jubilation as his young, mercenary wife, both abuses and thrills him with her flirtatious and calculating ways. The other one is, of course, its quirky title - I just couldn't pass a book titled like that, even though I profess absolutely no knowledge of even the most rudimentary Ukrainian.

The story adds further depth looking back at the younger life of the old man and his involvement with tractors and his escape from Ukraine. To quote Leo Tolstoy, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".