The book was a very funny and (in parts) sad family story. I do not have any sisters to bond/fight with but the relationship between the girls was very well written.

What a wonderful Ukrainian woman their mother was, and what hardship the family went through. While the father is really a bumbling fool I ended up feeling somewhat sorry for him.

You end up loving/hating the protagonist Valentina who is desperate to stay in the country and gain her citizenship.

The Historical Fiction insights in the book were really frightening to know what families went through just trying to survive.

This is a fun story of 2 expatriate Ukrianian sisters and their octogenarian father living in Petersborough, England who is having a "coming of age" crisis of companionship with a much younger Ukrainian woman who wishes to use his overtures to grease the skids for her own immigration to England. Having had an extensive exposure to Ukrainians myself, I found their caricatures authentic, a bit quirky, and humorous as they deal with their attachment to their father in his dotage and declining intellectual skills and the tensions and attachments between the two sisters. It interweaves the history of agricultural mechanization and its importance in the Soviet Union that the old man is translating into English as a backdrop to his romance and his daughters' frustrations with his newfound adolescent libido. It is written in 1st person from the perspective of the younger daughter who learns more about not only her her father, but her deceased mother and older sister during their trials of WW2 that are unmasked by the younger daughter as the story unfolds.

This quite extraordinary book with an even more extraordinary title was recommended to me by a good friend who neither revealed anything about the contents nor genre – she simply said, “read it, I think you’ll enjoy it.”
She was right.
A strange book in that it’s at once both incredibly comical and tragic, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian basically tells the story of two estranged sisters, Vera and Nadezhda (Nadia), who are appalled to discover that their widowed and elderly father is about to remarry a luscious Ukrainian woman, Valentina, many decades his junior. Valentina also has a teenage son whom she believes is a “genius”. And so a tale of reckless marriage, love thwarted, dishonour, honour, the past, memory, family and the human capacity to survive unfolds.
The opening of the book is quite stunning and sets a deceptive tone:
“Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eight-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky waters, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.”
Enter Valentina: stage right, a ruthless, cunning and beautiful woman who seduces the old man into marriage believing that, as someone who has forged a life in a Western country, he must have money, and who intends, through wedlock to make a better life for herself and her gifted son.
Forcing the two angry sisters to co-operate in order to first prevent their father’s marriage and later, instigate his divorce, the book is told mainly from Nadia’s point of view. Filled with eccentric characters (none more so than the elderly father and Valentina), passion, purpose, and desperation, it is at once very funny and moving.
Like Nadia, we’re drawn into her father’s alternating states of misery and jubilation as his young, mercenary wife, both abuses and thrills him with her flirtatious and calculating ways. Just when you think she’s the “slut” and “gold-digger” the eldest sister, Vera, is persuaded she is, the book also exposes the pathos and hardship that faces those who are displaced – through war, politics and Otherness. Moving back in time to war-time Europe, we’re given insights into what faced inhabitants of occupied countries; the horror of camps, of having loved ones torn from your side and the constant fear that becomes a part of life – fear of loss, of dreams unfulfilled and so much more.
Having experienced this herself (indirectly – Nadia was a peace-time baby who nonetheless witnessed what the war did to her family and became an immigrant too) and through her family who suffered greatly and quietly during the war, Nadia is able to view Valentina and her actions differently to most. Seguing from anger to empathy, the sociologist in her struggles to understand, not only Valentina, but her father and sister and later, the other besotted and desperate characters who Valentina, as her marriage deteriorates, drags into their lives.
Running parallel to all the emotional and psychological chaos of the present is not only the upheavals and horror of the past, but the ordered and academic work that the father works on – the history of tractors. Functioning as analogous to the main narrative, it takes the reader through the glory of agriculture, the boons that technology offered, the abilities of humans to create and harness the power such technology and the ability to control nature offered, but also the huge dangers that lie in succumbing to progress without balance. It also offers a cautionary tale about the seductions of the West – something the Ukrainian refugees know all too well.
The book is also about families, old age, tenderness, love, the ties that bind even when we don’t want them too. It’s about loss, forgiveness and the capacity to both remember and forget. It’s about passion, compassion and human’s dreadful facility for cruelty – even the unintended kind.
Delightful, moving, funny and utterly unforgettable, A Short History is a book that will resonate with me for a long time to come.

When Nikolai, an 84 year old Ukrainian immigrant living in England, tells his daughter, Nadezhda, that he is going to marry a woman in her 30's, all hell opens up. Nadhezda, who has not spoken to her older sister Vera in over two years, gets on the phone to call her. Estranged over the execution of their mother's will, they unite to try and protect their father from Valentina, a gold digger who he eventually marries. Valentina has an arrangement where she still resides with her ex-husband but she tells Nikolai that it is all Platonic.

Nikolai, a poet and engineer, is trying to write a history of tractors in the Ukraine. Nadezhda is trying to learn about her heritage and history.

As Nadezhda attempts to understand what is happening she is also trying to protect her errant father and his savings account. Family history and secrets become revealed. This is the story of a family told from the perspective of Nadezhda. It is also an exploration of the immigrant experience. All be told, it is also a love story.

This is simply a lovely book: poignant, well-written, funny and uplifting. The farce of an octogenarian father marrying a Russo-Ukrainian gold digger obscures the deep, incomprehensible dynamics of family life. The Short History of Tractors marries well with the catastrophic destruction of human societies in the 20th century, through war and economic "progress" alike. The characters, prose and indomitable human sympathy make this a fine book to read, and one to share with friends.