The Road Home: Rose Tremain

[poliphilo]

Lev is an economic migrant from an un-named post-Soviet society. He rattles around London- with an excursion to the asparagus fields of Suffolk- picking up skills, making the right friends, loving the wrong people. It's a book I'd recommend to anyone wanting to get a feel for the realities of England in the Nineties and Noughties- multicultural, battered, full of aspiration- and if it doesn't manage to bag itself a niche in the canon of so-called classics there's little justice in the literary world.