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Books

Marina Lewycka’s Granny steals the show

Her latest warmhearted tale centres round a friendly, bigoted Ukrainian grandmother making the best of dingy tower-block life

7 May 2016

9:00 AM

7 May 2016

9:00 AM

The Lubetkin Legacy Marina Lewycka

Fig Tree, pp.368, £14.99, ISBN: 9781905490561

Marina Lewycka’s latest happy-go-lucky tale of migrant folk in Britain takes a remark by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin as its epigraph: ‘Nothing is too good for ordinary people.’

In the vertical community within one of Lubetkin’s postwar blocks of flats in East London we meet hapless Bertie, resting actor caught on the hop by the spare-bedroom tax; disabled Len, thinking positive about his benefit reassessment; Violet, dreaming of her childhood in Kenya at her desk in a City insurance firm; and many more — some powering ahead in our new age of golden job opportunities and zero-hour contracts, others not...

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