Today Marina Lewycka is a world class writer. With her first novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) selling over a million copies in the UK alone, it has now been translated into over 30 languages. Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature, Lewycka’s witty tragicomic style was a…

On gazing at a ward full of young children born with horrific defects due to fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, Grigory Brovkin is preoccupied with the “beauty and ugliness resting within the single body of a diseased infant. The two faces of nature brought into stark relief.” Such contrasts are manifold in the story of Grigory; we…