The Road Home: A Novel

The journey begins with Lev's bus journey from his home in Poland to the loneliness of impersonal London. Lev is into his early forties, has recently lost his wife to cancer and believes that the only way that he can support his very young daughter and his mother is to find himself a job in London. His life-long friend, who supposedly knows such things, has told Lev that he should be able to get by in London on £20 a week. The truth becomes apparent within 24 hours of his arrival at Victoria Bus Terminus when he finds out how much it's going to cost for one night's B & B. During the bus journey, Lev has struck up a friendship with a female teacher who already has good contacts in London. Throughout the book, this lady comes to Lev's rescue in times of trouble. Unsurprisingly, finding work is not as easy has Lev had thought it would be. However, following his adventures, with their ups and downs, is an enjoyable ride, liberally splashed with some good humour and many touching moments and reminiscences. This book will make you laugh and it will make you cry. It will make you think about the society that we live in. It is a wonderful book.

Do publishers not want to sell books? The hardback cover shows a faceless street in far-from central London, bedraggled shoppers walking past gray concrete buildings blurred by the streaming rain. The opening description is not any more enticing: a fortyish man from some Eastern European country, widowed and out of work, journeys to London by fifty-hour bus to try to make money to support his mother and young daughter. He finds a city more expensive, less hospitable, and more xenophobic than anything he could have imagined. Within days, he is sleeping under somebody's basement steps. But he also finds a few unexpected acts of kindness, like the Moslem cafe owner who gives him a temporary job and a free meal. Our hero, Lev, turns out to be a resilient person with a lot of determination and a sense of humor -- humor that (once he gets a cell phone) he shares with a friend back home, a crazy optimist who sees him through some bad times. Before long, the book that I was reluctant to read had become the book I could hardly put down. There have been numerous accounts of new immigrants to Britain, notably Zadie Smith's WHITE TEETH and Monica Ali's BRICK LANE, but this is unusual in being seen from an Eastern European perspective. It is also unusual in that Lev never intends to stay in England. Even though he makes some very good friends in London (including a passionate lover), part of his thoughts remain with his family. The book thus becomes a sensitive study in love and loneliness, as the road home leads through some strange detours. My one problem with the book is a certain inconsistency of tone. Tremain's realism tends to be grittier than life and her upbeats correspondingly more glowing; in this, she is a little like Dickens, a fabulist, a romantic at heart. Lev has some reversals, especially painful when they are his own stupid fault. But on the whole he is lucky, finding jobs in various aspects of the food business and employers perceptive enough to see his strengths. His discovery of good food is a revelation after a life of communist rations. As his skills increase, he takes pride in his new metier and uses it to share his joy with other people. Among these are the residents of a retirement home whose menus (written by his teenage assistant) he enlivens with dishes such as "Chef's fantastic fish gratin with zero bones and non-crap crumb." Despite its familiarity with the underside of London life, THE ROAD HOME eventually plays out as a kind of fable, with Lev as an unlikely Cinderella, whose good fortune comes to him by hard work and the slow emergence of qualities that were in him all the time. [4.5 stars]

This is a touching and charming novel about Lev from an unnamed Eastern European country in the EU. He is 42, has recently lost his much loved wife Marina and then lost his job when the sawmill in which he had been working closed down. With a wrench he has left his five-year old daughter Maya with his mother Ina, and has set off from his village to find work in London, with a view, of course, of earning enough to send back to Ina and eventually to take `the road home' himself. He has at first very little English, and, unlike his friend Rudi back at home, he is a dreamy and not very obstacle-conquering person. During all the things that happen to him in England, his mind goes back to memories of the life and the people he has left behind, and every now and again he spends some of his hard-earned money on mobile phone-calls to Rudi, whose early ebullience ebbs away in the face of problems besetting him and the village. So the book is a series of evocative vignettes of English and of East European life; and these show a fabulous inventiveness (or perhaps the weaving together of a great range of Rose Tremain's memories or experiences), but each of them rings true. And what happens to him in London? Anything from kindness through indifference to hostility. But actually most of the people he is in contact with are friendly. He finds work as a washer-up in a posh restaurant. The work is tiring and the owner is exacting, but also appreciative of his workers when they achieve the fiercely high standards he demands: this isn't exactly the mean and unscrupulous exploitation described in Marina Lewycka's `Two Caravans' (see my review - as in that novel there is also in this one a section on immigrants of different nationalities working on a farm). The atmosphere of this book is much kindlier. Lev learns much from his work in the restaurant; and food and cooking will play an enormous role in the book - nourishing in many more senses of the word than one. All sorts of people befriend Lev: a compatriot who wants to take him to an Elgar concert; his unhappy Irish landlord whose wife and child have left him; a playwright who tries to explain `transgressive theatre' to him; a young woman who makes `ironic' hats for, among others, the princesses Beatrice and Eugenie - all these talk to Lev, making no concessions to his still limited vocabulary, using slang expressions or words which he only partially understands, so that he feels clumsy, inadequate, angry - and lonely. Some women seem to be fond of him, but, still grieving for Marina, for some months he stiffly resists their advances. Then comes a chapter significantly entitled `Why Shouldn't a Man Choose Happiness?" and the ones that follow are very moving. We are half way through the book, and then everything shifts again, and it would be a spoiler if I described how. Suffice it to say that after the warmth of encountering "genuine" people, he comes up against a smart set who acclaim transg

Two months after its publication, everybody ought to be talking about THE ROAD HOME. It ought to be the book of the year, and it isn't. It's my book of the year, though. I dreaded an uplifting parable of the Immigrant Experience. What I got was a hero of such specific integrity, depth, decency and pain that his journey becomes not simply the story of a stranger in a strange land, but a revelation of the truths "foreigners" tell us about ourselves. When the sawmill where Lev worked closes down ("They ran out of trees"), he leaves Auror, his (fictional) village somewhere in Eastern Europe, entrusting his young daughter to his mother's care (his wife has died, tragically young). In London, some people are kind to him; others, casually cruel: "This is how these people see me," Lev thinks at one point, "as a turnip with no intelligence and no voice." He never comes off as a victim, though. He finds a rented room and a job washing dishes in a chic restaurant, and ultimately discovers a passion and talent for cooking that he parlays into a dream for the future --- and a pathway back to his homeland. Lev is almost old-fashioned in his sensibility (and even in his vices, cigarettes and vodka). In teeming, driven modern London, he is allergic to the brittle, pseudo-creative denizens of the culture of cool. But he seems to have an instinct for connecting with those who appreciate his discipline and understand his lingering sadness (it's no accident that he improves his English by struggling through HAMLET; it's as if the ghosts of Auror have followed him to Britain). Probably my favorite moments in the book are set in the restaurant. Rose Tremain evokes the controlled chaos, pinpoint timing and near-military precision of a professional kitchen --- it's run like a small autocratic state --- in several brilliantly cinematic scenes. What's exciting is to watch the evolution of Lev's taste: his first encounters with refined cuisine (Auror is not known for four-star bistros), his experiments with cooking, and finally his fantasy of a restaurant of his own. There is an affection for food here --- what it is, what it does, where it comes from --- that makes THE ROAD HOME a nourishing novel as well as a moving one. I was enthralled, too, by Tremain's dense, Dickens-sized cast of fully realized supporting characters. To name a few: Rudi, Lev's volatile friend back home, a taxi driver whose temperamental secondhand "Tchevi" is a symbol of the U.S. as another "promised land." Lydia, Lev's accidental companion on the bus to London, who develops a crush on him and is often his reluctant savior. His landlord, Christy, a good-hearted, alcoholic Irishman whose wife has left, taking their daughter. The staff of the restaurant, most significantly Lev's lover, Sophie ("Hardly anybody is good," she tells him. "But you are"). The Indian woman Christy courts. The elderly residents of the nursing home Sophie and Lev visit on Sundays. The Suffolk farmer, Midge, "lonely lord of

The Road Home, which was released yesterday, August 26, has already been awarded the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Sometimes I read a book that has won a prestigious award and I come away wondering why it won, or I may understand why, but award or no, I just didn't like the book. Not so with The Road Home. It is completely deserving of the Orange Prize and I loved every page of it. Rose Tremain has given us a poignant, perfectly crafted novel. It is beautifully written. The plot ambles along at a relaxed and steady pace, but never once did I lose interest. I attribute this to two things. First, the compelling characters and Tremain's ability to draw the reader in, to make us emotionally invested in what happens to these rather ordinary people. Lev ... I really liked this guy. And by the book's end, I knew him so well. Lev's journey to London and the life he lived there made the immigrant experience so real. The competing cacophony of emotions: he was hopeful, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, sad, at one point blissfully in love. He felt he was betraying those he left behind just by being in London, even though he was there to make life better for them; if he enjoyed life in his temporary city, he felt guilty. I felt Lev's frustration with the language barrier. Reading about how he was treated as somehow inferior just because he dressed differently, had different mannerisms, struggled to understand and make himself understood made my heart break with sympathy. There were other characters who I grew to care about, and surprisingly most were men. I sometimes find it difficult to warm to adult male characters. But in this case, I quickly came to adore Rudi, Lev's brash and reckless, yet big-hearted old friend and Christy Slane, Lev's sweet, easygoing, down on his luck London flatmate. The second thing that stands out about this novel are the descriptions of the two central places: London and the unnamed Eastern European country Lev comes from. The richly textured images Tremain so masterfully creates stand alone, but are especially meaningful when viewed in contrast. Lev's home country, struggling to feel hopeful after the fall of communism seemed bleak, faded, gray, sadly downtrodden. London, a frenzied melting pot, at times glamorous and sophisticated, at others gritty and ordinary, but always colorful and alive. The characters and images in this highly readable, exquisitely written book will remain with me long after I turned the last page.