Author Marina Lewycka – born to Ukrainian parents in Germany, and brought up in the UK – has said that she set out deliberately to entertain in A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian after writing several novels with big ideas and serious themes that failed to get published. She certainly succeeded in her intentions, producing a novel that won the 2005 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and was short-listed for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction, losing only to Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin.

At the heart of the book is Nikolai, an eccentric 84-year-old tractor expert who falls in love and marries Valentina, a glamorous Ukranian blonde immigrant half his age with enormous breasts and dreams of nothing less than “oxfordcambridge education” for her teenage son.

Concerned about Valentina’s motives, daughters Nadezhda and Vera, considerably older than their father’s new wife, unite with each other and engage in a hugely entertaining long, drawn-out struggle to save him from the voluptuous "gold-digger". The result is a clever, touching story with “some good jokes and an overdose of slapstick.”

Published in 2005.