Shelf Control #4: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

Shelf Control is a weekly book meme @ Bookshelf Fantasies in which we write about one book that we want to read and already own. Read our hostess Lisa’s choice for this week over here.

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 divorcée. 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 . . .  (Goodreads)

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A decade earlier, this novel was all the rage, so when I saw it being offered at throw-away price, I grabbed it. The title is a little quirky and I wonder if that’s the reason I haven’t read it as yet.

If you have read it, how did you find it?

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