Excerpt from Strawberry Fields (Two Caravans) by Marina Lewycka, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He doesn’t remember much about She≈eld, but three things stand out in his memory from that visit. First, he recalls, there was a banquet, and a sticky pink dessert, of which he ate so much that he was later horribly, messily, pinkily sick in the back of a car.

Second, he remembers that the renowned visionary ruler of the city, who had welcomed them warmly with a long-long speech about solidarity and the dignity of labor (the speech had so impressed his father that he repeated it many times over), who had sat next to them at the banquet and kindly pressed more and more of that treacherous pink dessert on him, and in the back of whose car he had later been sick - this man was blind. The man’s astonishing blindness, the fearsome all-excluding wall bricked up behind his visionary eyes, had fascinated Andriy. He had closed his eyes tight and tried to imagine what it would be like to live behind that wall of blindness; he went around bumping into things, until his father slapped him and told him to behave himself.

The other thing he remembers is his first kiss. The girl - she must have been a daughter of one of the delegates - was older and bolder than him, a long-legged girl with white blond hair and a sprinkle of freckles on her nose. She smelled of soap and bubble gum. While the fraternal speeches droned on and on in the hall, the two of them had played a wild game of chase along the echoing corridors of the vast civic building, racing up and down stairs, dodging in doorways, shrieking with excitement. She had pounced on him at last and wrestled him down on the stone stairs, pinning him to the ground, pressing her strong body on top of him. They were both out of breath, panting and laughing. Suddenly she had swooped down on him with her lips and kissed him - a wet, insistent kiss, her tongue pushing against his mouth. It was a kiss of subjugation. He’d been too young and too astonished to do anything but surrender. Then she’d given him a bit of paper with her name scrawled on it, the "i"s dotted with little hearts. Vagvaga Riskegipd. An incredibly sexy name. And a telephone number. He still has it, tucked into the back of his wallet like a talisman. At school, when the other boys chose to study Russian language or German, he chose English.

He tries to conjure up her face. Fair hair. Freckles. The smell of bubble gum is vivid in his memory. An incredibly sexy smell. Does she still remember him? What does she look like now? She would be in her early thirties. What would she do if he suddenly appeared on her doorstep?

They say Angliski women are incredibly sexy. According to Vitaly, who knows these things, Angliski women are as cold as ice to touch, but once they start to melt - once the passion heats them and they melt inside - it’s just like a river bursting its banks. There’s no stopping these Vagvaga women; these Mrs. Brown women. A man has to keep a cool head or he could drown in the torrent of their passion. But getting them to the melting point - there’s a real skill in that, says Vitaly. The Angliska woman is attracted to dashing men of action, men who are bold enough to make hazardous journeys and climb in through bedroom windows bearing boxes of chocolates, et cetera. This type of behavior melts the Angliska woman’s icy heart. Will strawberries be okay as a substitute for chocolates? For all other acts in this drama he’s prepared. He’s ready for anything. He feels the lifeblood pulsing through his body, and he wants to live - to live more sweetly, more intensely.

"Be a man," his father had said.

One of the annoying things about my mother is the way she always classifies people according to their level of culture. It’s as if she carries a perfectly defined hierarchy of culture in her head.

"It doesn’t cost anything to be cultured, Irina," she says, "which is just as well, because if it did, teachers would be among the least cultured people in Ukraine."

Excerpted from Strawberry Fields by Marina Lewycka Copyright © 2007 by Marina Lewycka. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Group USA, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.