Marina Lewycka casts a witty eye on modern values in this her fourth novel. It features parents Marcus and Doro who spent more than 20 years until the early 1990s living in a left-wing commune. Their grown-up children are rather different – son Serge pretends to be doing a PhD at Cambridge but is really making a fortune in the City, Clara is a primary schoolteacher who craves order and clean bathrooms, while Oolie-Anna has Downs Syndrome and is desperate to live on her own.
Lewycka, whose first novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction and the Waverton Good Read Award, brings her unique blend of irony and wit to bear on the characters and events.