I went into town yes'day and bought this (along with a load of Dr Who books) and I was reading it on the train home ... got a few pages in, seemed fairly amusing.
Gave the bag to one of the boys at some point and somewhere in a shop he set it down and ... well ... that was that ... all the books lost!
Here's what we do - at the start of the month, we pick a book. As we read it, we post whether to recommend or to avoid.
Then book for May is Two Caravans by Marina Lewycka:
"An idyll of the English countryside: a beautiful summer's evening in a Kent field, and around their two caravans a little group of strawberry pickers is getting ready to celebrate a birthday.
"But who picks our strawberries these days? The Ukrainians: Irina, just off the coach from Kiev, and eager to improve her excellent English and find true love with a romantic Englishman; Andriy, the miner's son from the other Ukraine; the Poles: Bob Dylan fan, Tomasz, (whose smelly trainers will soon punish those in the men's caravan), Yola, the petite, voluptuous gangmistress and her religious niece Marta, who finds the wild mushrooms to cook with the sliced loaf; then there is Vitaly, king of the new mobilfon world of the shiny new Eastern Europe; two Chinese girls; Emanuel, the round eyed eighteen-year-old from Malawi, come to England to look for his sister. And although he can't exactly help pick strawberries, there's also the Dog...
"But these are a group leading dangerous lives - exploitative employers, British regulations and gang masters with guns will all threaten their existence as they take to the caravan road until each of them peels off to find their destiny.
"Hilarious, gritty, moving, and slapstick by turns Two Caravans has every bit of the extraordinary distinctiveness and wit and heart that made A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian so successful."
First reports coming soon.
If you don't want to buy it - join your local library.
