Penguin Podcast 44 - Audiobook Special

Welcome to the Penguin podcast, where today we preview two of our top spring audiobook titles, Booker prize-winning The Inheritance of Loss and the highly-awaited Two Caravans, follow up to bestselling A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian. 

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For information about any of the authors and books featured in these podcasts, plus features, interviews and news on the best in UK fiction and non-fiction, visit Penguin Books.

In the foothills of the Himalayas sits a once grand, now crumbling house – home to three people and a dog. There is the retired judge dreaming of colonial yesterdays; his orphaned granddaughter Sai who has fallen for her clever maths tutor; the cook whose son Biju writes untruthful letters home from New York City; and Mutt, whose bark is worse than her bite.

Around the house swirls mountain mist – but also the forces of revolution and change. For a new world is clashing with the old, and the future offers both hope and betrayal …

Buy the audiobook from 7 June

An idyll of the English countryside: a beautiful summer's evening in a Kent field, and around their two caravans a little group of strawberry pickers is getting ready to celebrate a birthday. 

But who picks our strawberries these days?  The Ukrainians: Irina, just off the coach from Kiev, and eager to improve her excellent English and find true love with a romantic Englishman; Andriy, the miner's son from the other Ukraine; the Poles: Bob Dylan fan, Tomasz, (whose smelly trainers will soon punish those in the men's caravan), Yola, the petite, voluptuous gangmistress and her religious niece Marta, who finds the wild mushrooms to cook with the sliced loaf; then there is Vitaly, king of the new mobilfon world of the shiny new Eastern Europe; two Chinese girls; Emanuel, the round eyed eighteen-year-old from Malawi, come to England to look for his sister.  And although he can't exactly help pick strawberries, there's also the Dog...

But these are a group leading dangerous lives - exploitative employers, British regulations and gang masters with guns will all threaten their existence as they take to the caravan road until each of them peels off to find their destiny.

Hilarious, gritty, moving, and slapstick by turns Two Caravans has every bit of the extraordinary distinctiveness and wit and heart that made A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian so successful.

Buy the book

Comments

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