Not that Kolya is unduly sympathetic himself, as flashbacks show him responsible for his mother-in-law’s death back in Ukraine. Their father’s marriage soon turns sour, and the frail Kolya’s adoration of Valentina turns to fear as the promiscuous predator physically abuses him. Now the sisters contact lawyers and immigration authorities. Their rapprochement is strengthened once Nadia learns their family’s darkest secret (the fight for survival, before she was born, in a German labor camp). The sisters haven’t spoken since a disagreement over their mother’s will, but the common enemy Valentina draws them back together. The focus is on her father, the book he’s writing (see title), his past in the old country, and her relationship with her sister Vera, ten years older.
The story is narrated by Nadia, one of Kolya’s two daughters, a university lecturer with an English husband and child, though we learn little about them. Valentina needs the right papers for herself and her teenaged son Stanislav, and as much of Kolya’s money as she can get her hands on. His wife, Ludmilla, has been dead two years when he meets another Ukrainian, 36-year-old Valentina, and is enchanted by her winning ways and massive boobs.
Kolya Mayovskyj is an octogenarian, a retired engineer with a love of poetry, philosophy and tractors. The old man who makes a fool of himself over a younger woman is a staple of the human comedy, and, in Lewycka’s first novel, the old man lives in England, an immigrant from Ukraine like the author herself. Ancient widower weds gold digger daughters intervene goodbye, gold-digger.
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