The Road Home

Like so many others, Lev is on his way from Eastern Europe to Britain, seeking work. He is a tiny part of a vast diaspora that is changing British society. But Lev is also a singular man with a vivid outsider’s vision of the place we call home.

Lev begins with no job, little money and few words of English. He has only his memories, his hopes and a certain alarming skill with the preparation of food. Behind him loom the figures of his dead wife, his beloved daughter and his outrageous friend Rudi who – dreaming of the wealthy West – lives largely for his battered Chevrolet.

In front of Lev lies the deep strangeness of the British: their hostile streets, clannish pubs, lonely flats and their obsession with celebrity. London holds out the alluring possibilities of friendship, sex, money and a new career; but, more than this, of human understanding, a sense of belonging.

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Rose Tremain reads from The Road Home

Rose Tremain

writes novels, short stories and screenplays. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have been translated into numerous languages and have won many prizes, including the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary Awards and the Sunday Express Book of the Year. Three of her novels are currently in development as films.

Rose Tremain's q & a

What sparked The Road Home?
I believe that when we think about people in a collective way – as, for instance, ‘immigrants, ‘foreigners’, ‘outsiders’ etc. – we tend to lack empathy with them and, almost invariably, to see their contribution to our society in a negative light. But the moment we become engaged with an individual story, empathy arrives and our attitudes alter. So this is the intention of The Road Home: it aims to chart the journey of one (broken-hearted) man from Eastern Europe through our society, and to explore what he makes of us and what we make of him - in such a way that, by the end, he is fully human and knowable to us and we are more knowable to ourselves.

Where and when is the novel set?
It’s set mainly in contemporary London – this ancient, crowded, competitive, flawed, yet magnificent city of ours. The book also takes the protagonist, Lev, to rural Suffolk, to join a gang of migrant vegetable pickers and (in flashback) to his home village of Auror. Auror is an entirely invented place, but, to invent it, I read a lot about 21st Century life in Poland and Russia and had photographs from these places pinned around my desk.

Do you have a favourite character in the novel?
I got very attached to Lev, my central character. I deliberately made him seductive and basically good, so that the reader cares what happens to him and longs for him to realise his hopes. But I think that the character I enjoyed writing the most was Rudi, Lev’s anarchic friend, who treats life like the fifteen rounds of Prize Fight – a perfect 21st Century man!

What’s your favourite children’s book and why?
The books I loved most as a child were a series called The Adventures of Pearl and Plain. The stories were about two dolls made of knitting needles. The real world was vast to them: they viewed the hearth rug as a jungle and the bath as a ski-slope. Their favourite food was apple pips. But who wrote these books? I’ve tried to track them down, but I think no one remembers them. Later, when my daughter was little, the book we both loved most was The Voyage of QV66 by Penelope Lively, about a post apocalyptic world in which only a group of animals survives, steered across the flood plains by a bossy monkey. In all of this reading humour plays an important part.