Joanna Biggs writes:

Two Caravans begins with sunrise over a Kentish strawberry field. There are two caravans next to the field, one for women and one for men. Yola, the Polish supervisor, has a single bunk, her niece Marta another and two Chinese girls (Yola can’t ‘get the hang of their names’) share a pull-out double bed. In the other caravan, Ukrainian Andriy, Malawian Emanuel and Vitaly, who speaks Russian, Ukrainian and Polish, sleep in the sitting-room, with Polish Tomasz in the only bedroom. In Marina Lewycka’s fiction, people usually seen at the edges are moved to the centre. Lewycka’s fictional world speaks of 3D jobs (dirty, dangerous or difficult), and of the impact of globalisation on irregular migration and sex trafficking.

(LRB 22 March 2007)

Fig Tree | hardback 310 pp. |ISBN: 9780670916375