If you liked Marina Lewycka's We Are All Made of Glue...
...here are two more novels that mix dark subjects with typically Eastern European black humour...
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
The debut novel from the American author who, like Lewycka, has Ukranian ancestry.
A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into bizarre new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis Jr, Jr. What they are looking for seems elusive - a truth hidden behind veils of time, language and the horrors of war. What they find turns all their worlds upside down.
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Coincidentally, Nicole Krauss is married to Jonathan Safran Foer, and is herself has Eastern European heritage.
Polish immigrant Leo Gursky has only ever loved once in his lifetime and he has been alone in the world ever since. He is now just about surviving life in America, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbour know he’s still alive. But life wasn’t always so empty: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. Now, in contemporary New York, he has forgotten all about it, thinking that the book, along with the girl he loved, has been lost forever.
Little does he know that over the other side of the same city 15-year old Alma is searching for a way to cure her mother’s loneliness following the death of her husband. She is determined to discover the story behind the book that has changed her mother’s life, without knowing just how far this book has travelled and how many lives it has inextricably linked.
