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Rose Tremain's prodigious talents as a prose writer are on full display in The Road Home, and her novel never loses sight of what is truly important in the lives we lead.
In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. After a spell of homelessness, he finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant, and a room in the house of an appealing Irishman who has also lost his family. Never mind that Lev must sleep in a bunk bed surrounded by plastic toys--he has found a friend and shelter. However constricted his life in England remains he compensates by daydreaming of home, by having an affair with a younger restaurant worker (and dodging the attentions of other women), and by trading gossip and ambitions via cell phone with his hilarious old friend Rudi who, dreaming of the wealthy West, lives largely for his battered Chevrolet.
Women's Prize for Fiction, 2008
"[An] adroit émigré's look at London." - Publishers Weekly.
"A sort of anti-Candide...Lev manages to be both a symbol of migrant workers and a fully developed character in his own right...an engaging, enjoyable, and informative read." - Booklist.
"Tremain...has written a worthy addition to the growing body of work centered on the loneliness and frustration of the immigrant experience." - Library Journal.
"Starred Review. Lev offers readers ample reason to get lost in this immensely likable novel's many pleasures. One of the best from the versatile Tremain, who keeps on challenging herself, and rewarding readers." - Kirkus Reviews.
"For a writer more accustomed to the distant past of the historical novel, the story of a modern-day economic migrant is a bold move, but Rose Tremain does not disappoint. The Road Home is thematically rich, dealing with loss and separation, mourning and melancholia, and what might underlie the ostensibly altruistic act of moving to another country to earn money for one's family. As always, her writing has a delicious, crunchy precision: plants sold in a market are 'fledgling food'; winter is described as having a 'deep, purple cold'; new buds on larch trees are 'a pale dust, barely visible to the eye'." - The Guardian (UK).
"Curious, baffled, angry, honourable, rash and passionate, Lev is a tremendous creation, inhabited by his begetter to a depth that passes beyond empathy and into identification." - The Independent.
"Tremain writes so beautifully about Lev's passage from near-destitution to success that it seems perverse to complain that she hasn't made her book uglier." - The Times (UK).
This information about The Road Home was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rose Tremain, born in London in 1943, was one of only five women writers to be included in Granta's original list of 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 1983. Her novels and short stories have been published worldwide in 27 countries and have won many prizes, including the Sunday Express book of the Year Award (for Restoration, also shortlisted for the Booker Prize); the Prix Femina Etranger, France (for Sacred Country); the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award (for Music & Silence) and the Orange Prize for Fiction 2008 (for The Road Home). Restoration was filmed in 1995 and a stage version was produced in 2009. Her latest novel is The Gustav Sonata which sees Rose 'writing at the height of her inimitable powers' (Observer).
Rose lives in Norfolk, England with the ...
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