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

"Irina, my baby, you can still change your mind! You don’t have to go!"

Mother was wailing and dabbing at her pinky eyes with a tissue, causing an embarrassing scene at the Kiev bus station.

"Mother, please! I’m not a baby!"

You expect your mother to cry at a moment like this. But when my craggy old Papa turned up too, his shirt all crumpled and his silver hair sticking up like an old-age porcupine, okay, I admit it rattled me. I hadn’t expected him to come to see me on.

"Irina, little one, take care."

"Shcho ti, Papa. What’s all this about? Do you think I’m not coming back?"

"Just take care, my little one." Sni√e. Sigh.

"I’m not little, Papa. I’m nineteen. Do you think I can’t look after myself?"

"Ah, my little pigeon." Sigh. Sni√e. Then Mother started up again. Then - I couldn’t help myself - I started up too, sighing and sni√ing and dabbing my eyes, until the bus driver told us to get a move on, and Mother shoved a bag of bread and salami and a poppy seed cake into my hands, and we were on. From Kiev to Kent in forty-two hours.

Okay, I admit, forty-two hours on a bus is not amusing. By the time we reached Lviv, the bread and salami were all gone. In Poland, I noticed that my ankles were starting to swell. When we stopped for fuel somewhere in Germany, I stuned the last crumbs of the poppy-seed cake into my mouth and washed it down with nasty metallic-tasting water from a tap that was marked not for drinking. In Belgium my period started, but I didn’t notice until the dark stain of blood seeped through my jeans onto the seat. In France I lost all sensation in my feet. On the ferry to Dover I found a toilet and cleaned myself up. Looking into the cloudy mirror above the washbasin I hardly recognized the wan dark-eyed face that stared back at me - was that me, that scruny straggly-haired girl with bags under her eyes? I walked around to restore the circulation in my legs, and, standing on the deck at dawn, I watched the white clins of England materialize in the pale watery light, beautiful, mysterious, the land of my dreams.

In Dover I was met on the boat by Vulk, waving a bit of card with my name on it - Irina Blazkho. Typical - he’d gotten the spelling wrong. He was the type Mother would describe as a person of minimum culture, wearing a horrible black fake- leather jacket, like a comic-strip gangster - what a koshmar! - it creaked as he walked. All he needed was a gun.

He greeted me with a grunt. "Hrr. You hen passport? Peppers?"

His voice was deep and sludgy, with a nasty whin of cigarette smoke and tooth decay on his breath.

This gangster-type should brush his teeth. I fumbled in my bag, and before I could say anything, he grabbed my passport and Seasonal Agricultural Worker papers and stowed them in the breast pocket of his koshmar jacket.

"I keep for you. Is many bed people in England. Can stealing from you."

He patted the pocket and winked. I could see straightaway that there was no point in arguing with a person of his type, so I hoisted my bag onto my shoulder and followed him across the car park to a huge shiny black vehicle that looked like a cross between a tank and a Zill, with darkened windows and gleaming chrome bars in the front - a typical mafia-machine. These high-status cars are popular with primitive types and social undesirables. In fact he looked quite a bit like his car: overweight, built like a tank, with a gleaming silver front tooth, a shiny black jacket, and a straggle of hair tied in a ponytail hanging down his back like an exhaust pipe. Ha ha.

He gripped my elbow, which was quite unnecessary - stupid man, did he think I might try to escape? - and pushed me onto the backseat with a shove, which was also unnecessary. Inside, the mafia-machine stank of tobacco. I sat in silence looking nonchalantly out the window while he scrutinized me rudely through the rearview mirror. What did he think he was staring at? Then he lit up one of those thick vile-smelling cigars - Mother calls them New Russian cigarettes - what a stink! and started pu≈ng away. Pun. Stink.

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.