Marina Lewycka Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of Standalone Novels
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian | (2005) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Two Caravans | (2007) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
We Are All Made Of Glue | (2009) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Various Pets Alive and Dead | (2012) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Lubetkin Legacy | (2016) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid | (2020) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
A Shorter History of Tractors in Ukrainian with Handcuffs | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Dependant's Tale | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Comma Singles Books
Fewer Things | (2011) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Skirt | (2012) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Hitting Trees with Sticks | (2012) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Crosswords | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
A Wolf | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Truth | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Sports Leader | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Earthquakes | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Tamagotchi | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Truck to Berlin | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Virgin and the Soldier | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Red Enters the Eye | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
An Industrial Evolution | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Cave | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Mr Carlton | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
A Paris Story | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Bicycle Express | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Flight into Egypt | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Abulafia | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Everything Is Moving, Everything Is Joined | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Pitch | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Morphogenesis | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Heart of Denis Noble | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
What Kind of Dog | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Crystal Night | (2013) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
My Soul to Keep | (2017) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Red Lights | (2017) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Many Years Ago, I Was Standing In A Meydan | (2017) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Jebel Moya | (2017) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The War of All Against All | (2017) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Easy on The Rose's | (2017) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Pardon List: A story from the Peasants' Revolt | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Mastiff: A story of The Diggers | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Heavy Clay Soil: A story from the Midlands Rising | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
A Fiery Flag Unfurled in Coleman Street: A story from Venner's Rising | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Trying Lydia: A story on the Luddites of Pentrich | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Banner Bright: A story on the Anti-Vietnam War Protests | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Kick-Start: A story on the National Blind March | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
For the Tape: A Story on the Aldermaston Marches | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
There Are Five Ways Out Of This Room: A Suffragette's Story | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Spun: A story of the Radical War | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Rivers of Blood: A story on the Anti-Rivers of Blood March | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
May Hobbs: A story on the Night Cleaners' Strike | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Stars are in the Sky: A story from Greenham Common | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Exterior Paint | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Beckhams are in Betty's | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Opposite of Drowning: A story on the Welsh Language Protests | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Never Going Underground: A story on Section 28 Protests | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Conrad Street | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Turd Tree: A story of Anti-Iraq War Demo | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Expectant Management | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Withen: A story from the Miners' Strike | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Bed 45: A story of the Brixton Riots | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Poison Tree | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Abandoned Person's Tale | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Gardens of Babylon | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Widening Gyre | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Kindling | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Sea-God | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Into Tiny Pieces | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Hare's Declaration | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Birds of Kipsala Island | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Bird of Paradise | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Slow Man | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Beginner's Guide to Smuggling | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Storyteller | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Return Ticket | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Child in the Lock | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Benzene Dreams | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
From Above | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Tank | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Biggest Bridge in the World | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Inertia | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Flypaper | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Dependant's Tale | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Testicular Cancer vs. the Behemoth | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Appellant's Tale | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Change for Low Rixham | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Lover's Tale | (2018) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Sayer of the Sooth | (2019) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
The Longhand Option | (2019) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Passing | (2019) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Living in Hope | (2021) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Publication Order of Anthologies
Freedom | (2009) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Ox-Tales: Earth | (2009) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Too Much Too Young | (2012) | Description / Buy at Amazon |
Marina Lewycka is a literary fiction author of Ukrainian origin who currently makes her home in the United Kingdom. The author was born in Kiel, Germany in a refugee camp in 1946. She has said that she can hardly remember anything about those early years even though her mother told her that she used to be a lovely baby.
When she was one year old, her family emigrate to England where they lived initially in Sussex and then in Burwash Common. During this time, her mother worked for their hosts doing housework and looking after the old ladies as Lewycka acquired an interest in poultry as she fed the ducks.
It was their hosts Miss Morton and Mrs. Dobbs who first taught Marina how to speak English, which she still does with a posh accent despite living in Yorkshire for nearly three dozen years.
In 1949, the family got their own home in the small mining village of Norton near Doncaster. The home was a small terraced house on a small lot with a lavatory in the back alley in which were hung small squares of torn newspapers that were used as toilet paper.
During this time, Marina Lewycka’s father worked in Doncaster where he was employed by the International Harvester Tractors company. Lewycka attended Pontefract’s St. Catherine School like many of her fellow kids.
It was at the school that her teachers first noticed her love for reading and gifted her Honor C Appleton’s “Mary Was Five and The Black Rock.” These among others such as “Ben the Flowerpot Men” and “Muffin the Mule and the Bill” would become some of her favorite novels.
It was from this that planted the seed for a desire to become a fiction. Over the years, the family moved all over the place and Marina continued writing in earnest. While she was in high school, she discovered a love for marginally sophisticated literature.
She began reading rhyming poetry particularly works from the likes of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Walter de la Mare. She used to picture herself as a sophisticated girl with moody eyes and a faraway look, even though her reality was very different.
While she had been a bright school girl and a cute baby, she was an appalling teenager who painted Cleopatra lines on her face and had cut off her plaits at sixteen.
In high school, Marina Lewycka took advanced classes in Russian, French, and English. She would then go to Keele University where she studied Philosophy and English.
While the college allowed the students to study whatever they wanted in their foundation year, English remained Marina’s favorite subject. She particularly loved the metaphysical poets, Chaucer and of course Shakespeare. She would end up studying drama and poetry and was introduced to James Joyce and W.B. Yeats.
Upon graduation in 1968 she decided to continue with her education and headed to the University of York where she earned her English degree. She would then get her doctorate degree from Kings College London, studying the works of the Diggers and the Levellers.
In 2005, she published “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” which paved the way for her to become a successful fiction author. Marina Lewycka now has more than half a dozen works to her name including a collection of short stories, novellas, and single-standing titles.
Marina Lewycka’s novel “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian” is a work that sold more than a million copies and it became a bestselling title. In the work, the authors tell the stories of Nadezhda and Vera two feuding sisters. The two sisters mend fences as they take on their father’s new girlfriend who they believe is a gold digger.
Two years after the death of their mother, their father met a glamorous Ukrainian divorcee and proceeded to fall in love. The man is thirty-four while his girlfriend is a thirty-six-year-old woman who explodes into their lives like a fluffy pink grenade.
She churns up the murky waters and brings back bad memories that the sisters are forced to reconcile to save their father from Valentina, the voluptuous gold digger. Their father’s new girlfriend has a proclivity for boil-in-the-bag cuisine and green satin underwear but is determined to get Western wealth.
However, the two sisters’ campaign to expel Valentina uncovers dark family secrets and sends them back to their roots and dark history. Part comedy and part tragedy, it is the story of ordinary-seeming people that somehow relive the horror of war in their nightly dreams.
“Two Caravans” by Marina Lewycka follows several seasonal workers from Malawi, Ukraine, Malaysia, China, and Poland that are employed picking strawberries in Kent.
They make their home in two caravans one reserved for men and the other for women. But then trouble broke out as Irina and several other women are in danger of being forced into becoming sex workers.
The group leaves for Dover and ultimately arrives in London. Slowly the group members go their own way until only Andriy and Irina from Ukraine are left with a dog that had joined them in London. They head to Sheffield which Andriy had once visited in childhood and always felt like it was some kind of El Dorado.
While it is a work that showcases workers living in deplorable conditions, the author somehow manages to insert some humor in it.
It makes for a refreshing take on circumstances that we cannot change. The work is not about acceptance but rather it combines this admirable strait with optimism making for a very moving story.
Marina Lewycka’s “In We Are All Made of Glue,” the lead is a woman named George Sinclair whose life is coming unstuck.
Her son has an obsession with the “End of the World,” her husband abandoned her, and even worse, Mrs. Shapiro her elderly neighbor has decided they are related.
It was the hospital that informed her when Mrs. Shapiro was involved in an accident and named him next of kin. However, this will not be resolved by a quick visit to the old woman’s ward.
She has a large house full of all manner of cats that need to be looked after and two agents who want to take away her estate. Other people who just complicate things include the social worker intent on putting her in a nursing home and the Usellesses who are useless at trying to repair the rickety old house.
In this work, the author wades into the familiar elderly Eastern European person axis in addition to a kaleidoscope of themes such as Kippax fixation, bondage to B&Q, and Armageddon to Arthur Scargill. The author also shows boldness as she wades into the Palestinian-Israeli question.
Book Series In Order » Authors »