ISBN: 9780141020525

Synopsis ‘Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.’ Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must put aside a lifetime of feuding to save their emigre engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth. But the sisters’ campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe’s darkest history and sends them back to roots they’d much rather forget…

Bookclub Review This is a light beach read and everyone enjoyed reading the book. The book is about family relationships something that the group could all identify with. The balance between parent and child, relationship between two sisters and a new entrant (2nd wife) into an already dysfunctional family. The group viewed the book at times to be comical and at other times to be a tragic.