When their recently widowed father announces he plans to remarry, sisters Vera and Nadezhda realise they must put aside a lifetime of feuding in order to save him. His new love is a voluptuous gold-digger from the Ukraine half his age, with a proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, who stops at nothing in her single minded pursuit of the luxury Western lifestyle she dreams of. But the old man, too, is pursuing his eccentric dreams - and writing a history of tractors in Ukrainian.
A wise, tender and deeply funny novel about families, the healing of old wounds, the trials and consolations of old age and - really - about the legacy of Europe's history over the last fifty years.
