The Road Home: A Novel - Hardcover

Tremain, Rose

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316002615 ISBN 13: 9780316002615

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2008

In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. After a spell of homelessness, he finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant, and a room in the house of an appealing Irishman who has also lost his family. Never mind that Lev must sleep in a bunk bed surrounded by plastic toys--he has found a friend and shelter. However constricted his life in England remains he compensates by daydreaming of home, by having an affair with a younger restaurant worker (and dodging the attentions of other women), and by trading gossip and ambitions via cell phone with his hilarious old friend Rudi who, dreaming of the wealthy West, lives largely for his battered Chevrolet.
Homesickness dogs Lev, not only for nostalgic reasons, but because he doesn't belong, body or soul, to his new country-but can he really go home again? Rose Tremain's prodigious talents as a prose writer are on full display in THE ROAD HOME, but her novel never loses sight of what is truly important in the lives we lead.

About the Author:

Rose Tremain lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes.

From AudioFile:

Juliet Stevenson's performance of THE ROAD HOME is nothing short of astonishing. Tremain's protagonist, Lev, emigrating from an Eastern Bloc country to work in the UK, speaks with a Slavic accent. In his homesick struggles to survive in a foreign culture completely different from his expectations, he meets people with Qatari, Irish, posh-Brit, old-lady, drunk-man, Chinese, Cockney, and young-girl voices. Stevenson renders each so impeccably, and makes them so distinct in timbre and personality as well as accent, that you utterly lose track of the fact that it's all created by one actor. Most of all, she delivers a moving story of one immigrant who occasionally does unwise or dopey things but never loses our interest or sympathy. Cause for celebration. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine