![]() ![]() Debarking from the Trans-Euro bus on which he meets a similarly down-at-heels countrywoman (Lydia, who’ll re-enter Lev’s new life at variously crucial moments), Lev acquires a fragile living working as a distributor of leaflets, as a dishwasher, and so on, slowly ascending the ladder of minimal solvency, making a painstaking adaptation to a society that seems, to his bemused view, inexplicably self-indulgent, pampered and unmotivated. He has left his young daughter and his (also widowed) mother behind (in a generically economically disadvantaged country that is and isn’t Poland), hoping to find work and send money home. The protagonist is Lev, a recently widowed and also jobless former sawmill worker. ![]() A displaced European’s Candide-like progress through contemporary London is charted in this ambitious novel from the Whitbread Award–winning British author ( The Colour, 2003, etc.). ![]()
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