Event Information

Marina Lewycka Talks about and Signs her New Book, Various Pets Alive & Dead

Monday 21 May 2012
7:30 pm

Most normal parents, you’d think, would be pleased to have a son not yet thirty and earning ninety grand a year. But not Doro and Marcus. They’d consider it the ultimate betrayal of his ideals, meaning their ideals, because Serge doesn’t claim to have any ideals apart from a vague general sense of goodwill towards mankind. And womankind. Especially Maroushka.

Marcus and Doro were part of a left-wing commune from the late 1960s until the early 1990s: lentils, free love, spliffs, Left politics, cheesecloth blouses, sex, housework and cooking rotas, crochet, allotments. Their children have grown up rather different from them: primary schoolteacher Clara craves order and clean bathrooms, son Serge is pretending to his parents that he is still doing a Maths PhD at Cambridge, while in fact working making loadsamoney in the City; while third child Oolie-Anna, who has Downs Syndrome, is desperate to escape home and live on her own.  Set half in Doncaster, half in London, this is a very funny riff on modern values, featuring hamsters, cockroaches, poodles, a Chicken and multiplying rabbits, told by Marina Lewycka in her unique and brilliant combination of irony, farce and wit.

Marina Lewycka was born in Kiel, Germany, after the war, grew up in England and lives in Sheffield. Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker and won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction and the Waverton Good Read Award. Her second novel, Two Caravans, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.

Marina Lewycka will be introduced by Ukrainian dissident, Vitali Vitaliev.  David’s Bookshop is located on Eastcheap in Letchworth (SG6 3DE)  Entry is £3 but is redeemable against the purchase of the book on the night.  Please call the bookshop on 01462 684631 or fill out the form here to reserve a space.