Portrait of a family of survivors

Fiction: Everything you ever thought you needed to know about tractors, as well as everything you ever wanted to know about families, and far more than you thought you knew on the subject, is contained in Marina Lewycka's witty, original and candid debut.

Any doubts you may have harboured about the relevance of domestic realism will also be silenced for good.

Most importantly, after more than half a century's worth of fiction dedicated to the enduring theme of war and displacement, here is a novel that looks at the legacy of upheaval with fresh eyes, an open mind and natural comic flair. This is a study of survivors, not heroes and was this week shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Fresh is the most fitting adjective applied to Lewycka's lively, intelligent narrative in which a great deal of information, history and observation sits easily. It is a flawless performance consolidated by bewilderment, exasperation and lots of irony.

Her likeable, observant, convincing and at times bewildered narrator, Nadezhada or Nadia, is the second daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who came to England from a defeated Europe, carrying with them Nadia's older sister, Vera, and their hopes for a better life. All has gone relatively well for Nadia; her English husband, Mike, is loyal, kindly and blessed with a good sense of humour. About her Ukrainian family, though, she still has doubts.

Having been in the 1960s a student radical, sufficiently left-wing in her ideas as to terrify and anger her anti-communist father, Nadia long-since restored to Pappa's love is middle aged, still mourning her dead mother and is worried about her widower father, engineer and poet, who, ever an eccentric, may now be losing his mind.

Now eighty-four, the old man informs Nadia he is about to remarry. His bride-to-be is almost 50 years his junior. She is Ukrainian, looks like Venus, "Botticelli's Venus rising from the waves. Golden hair. Charming eyes. Superior breasts. When you see her you will understand".

When Nadia meets Valentina she sees a large, determined Amazon dressed in small clothes who is motivated by greed and desperation, not love. Nor is she the intellectual companion father presents her as. Valentina needs a husband with full UK residency rights and sufficient wealth to keep her and her teenage son, whom she claims is a musical genius - well, he does revere Boyzone.

Romantic, hyper imaginative Nadia observes all of this with concern. As she fears for her soon to be duped father, she remembers her mother, into whose lovingly managed home the bizarre Valentina has thundered. There is also Nadia's long-term difficulties with her embittered older sister, Vera. The siblings are in battle over their mother's will. "My sister is 10 years older then me," notes Nadia. "She knew things I didn't know, things that were whispered but never spoken about. She knew grown up secrets so terrible that just the knowledge of them had scarred her heart."

The relationship between these sisters divided by a generation, as well as their contrasting experiences of the same family, is well handled. While Lewycka has great fun chronicling the outrageous antics of Valentina, an element of seriousness undercuts the tension between Vera and Nadia. "Now that Mother has died, Big Sis has become the guardian of the family archive, the spinner of stories, the custodian of the narrative that defines who we are. This role, above all others, is the one I envy and resent. It is time, I think, to find out the whole story, and to tell it in my own way."

And this is exactly what Nadia does. She tells the story of her family's past, as well as reporting on more recent events, such as her father's daft marriage. Lewycka looks to the history as a way of finding the truth. All the while, her father, although in the midst of a relationship that quickly collapses into a legal battle, distracts himself by writing a book. The text is, as hinted at by the title, concerned with the history of tractors. It is but one of many ingenious flourishes in this highly entertaining novel.

Pappa writes his erudite book, engages in long digressions replete with his accumulated store of knowledge; the scheming Valentina sets about securing several cars, none of which work; and the sisters bicker. Divorced, knowing Vera invariably manages to refer to Nadia as a "social worker", leaving Nadia to repeatedly correct her: "I'm a sociologist."

As the battle to rid the family of cunning Valentina, a brilliantly drawn character who combines earthy sexuality with honest-to-God greed, the sisters finally get to know each other, united as they now are by fear and dread. Their father, for all his cocky defiance and general knowledge, is in fact a very old and increasingly vulnerable man. There are two worlds under scrutiny here; that of present-day Britain superimposed upon that of the Ukraine, itself caught between its present and its past.

For Nadia, truth becomes all. "I have started to challenge Big Sis's self-appointed guardianship of the family story. She doesn't like it." The following exchange explains a great deal, not just about the family, but about each of the sisters and their contrasting grasp of family mythology.

"We come from solid bourgeois people, Nadezhda. Not arrivistes," announces Vera. "But the Ocheretkos were - what? Wealthy peasants . . ." "Farmers." " . . . turned horse-dealers." "Horse-breeders." "Cossacks, anyway. A bit wild, you might say." "Colourful." "And the Mayevskyjs were teachers." "Grandfather Mayevskyj was Minister of Education." "But only for six months. And of a country that didn't really exist."

The narrative moves fast, furious and funny without Lewycka ever losing control. Valentina is relentless. "First I get passport visa, then I get divorce. When I get divorce I will have half of house." While the usurper threatens the family, the sisters remain engaged in their own struggle.

As much as the story, and it is multidimensional, is a good one, the novel's success lies in the characterisation, dialogue and the enduring hurts Lewycka merely hints at.

Slowly but surely Vera releases the family history. She tells Nadia of their mother's grief at the death of a submarine commander. "What submarine commander?" asks Nadia. "From the Black Sea Fleet. He was the love of her life." "Not Pappa?"

For all her commitment to facts, Nadia the career academic avoids righteousness. She remains the loyal daughter, and oppressed kid sister, hurt by secrets and surprised by realities.

Emigration law and residency rights, divorce and property issues feature throughout. During one of the many calls made to lawyers and government departments, Nadia reflects on the Home Office at Lunar House, Croydon. "I imagine a vast pock-marked moonscape, empty and silent except for the eerie ringing of unanswered telephones."

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian would prove an inspired winner for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Unsentimental but touching, this richly exuberant human and humane comedy succeeds on many levels. Lewycka's full-hearted portrait of family as seen through the eyes of a daughter, and a sister, who simply sought the truth and found out much, much more, is above all, a subtle study in postwar realities as well as family secrets.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times