A short history of tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka

Okay, imagine you're an 84 year old man, and you think you have a shot with a 30-something Ukrainian woman with enormous breasts. What would you do?

Well, in this story, he 'helps' her go from Ukrana to England - as do numerous other men, apparently. He chews through his pension to buy her things, like travel visas, a blender, a car... And she marries him! Lucky guy, huh?

Nah, not quite, and the story of the buxom blonde bursting into the life of an old Ukranian migrant to England provides Lewycka a wonderful foil to do all sorts of things in one book: exploring a relationship of sisters born on either side of the end of the war; tracking through the dual personality of mechanisation as machines of agriculture and as machines of war; thinking about the changes in Eastern Europe and whether the rampant mode of capitalism from the early days of the Western model really need to be imitated for societies just starting down the path...

The tractors in the title got me interested enough to take the book, the notes on the back made me worried that it was going to be some girly maudlin story about families bonding in the face of hardship or some blather like that, and I ended up quite liking the book after all. Better than Updike's stories, that's for sure.