Lewycka’s engaging tale about a dysfunctional Ukrainian family is set in Peterborough in the early 1990s — a suitably drab, utilitarian setting for a work whose range of reference includes the horrors of Soviet labour camps, growing up in “austerity” Britain, and the labyrinthine workings of the immigration system.

Her narrator, Nadia, is, like the author, the child of Ukrainian refugees — a “peace baby”, born at the end of the Second World War, who has never known anything other than the mundane security of her parents’ adopted country. Unlike her rebarbative elder sister, Vera — the “war baby” of the family — Nadia prides herself on her left-wing views. It is these which are severely tested, when, to the dismay of both sisters, their 84-year-old widower father Nikolai decides to marry the voluptuous Valentina — an “economic migrant” less than half his age.

With her breasts “like twin warheads”, fluffy peep-toe mules and barbarous English, Valentina is a splendid comic creation. Alternately ludicrous and menacing, she bullies and cajoles the besotted Nikolai into giving her most of his savings, all the while taunting him with his lack of sexual prowess and parading her various lovers in front of him.

When it seems as if their father may actually be at risk of being murdered by his greedy and rapacious spouse, Nadia and Vera decide to take action, sinking their bitter differences in order to do so. Nadia finds herself, to her chagrin, turning into “Mrs Flog-’em-and-send- ’em-home”, jettisoning her liberal principles in her desire for revenge. What follows is, by turns, extremely funny and extremely dark, touching on subjects not usually treated as comedy, such as the abuse of the elderly and the hounding of asylum-seekers.

What makes this book more than just a jolly romp with political undertones is the way it captures the peculiar flavour of Eastern European immigrant life in the postwar years, and after. Details — a list of hoarded tins in a kitchen cupboard, for instance — conjure an era of make-do-and-mend. Family anecdotes — a father and teenage daughter arguing about communism — evoke intellectual debates once passionately fought, and long since rendered irrelevant. An old man devotes his declining years to writing a history of the tractor. Best of all is the author’s rendering of the “mongrel language” — half-English, half-Ukrainian — spoken by her characters, whose fractured syntax and colourful neologisms give the narrative its snap. These are people given to histrionics — “You she-cat-dog-vixen-flesh-eating witch” is a typically vigorous piece of invective.

Underlying these outbursts are darker memories of the Soviet era, when a word in the wrong ear could mean betrayal. It is this shameful history that Nadia — trying to piece together the truth about her family’s past — has to come to terms with. Gradually she understands why she and her sister — born ten years apart — have grown up with such different views of their shared Eastern European past. Eventually she comes to understand — and to forgive — her parents. This is a novel in which ghosts are laid — the ghosts of international conflicts, and those of family strife. Uncomfortable ironies are explored: the tendency of “assimilated” immigrants to reject more recent incomers — even those of their own kind — is one of these. All of which makes A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian a very rich mixture indeed, as well as very enjoyable reading. One can see why it was an obvious choice for BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime.

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