The Road Home
by Rose Tremain
Summary
Lev is in his forties, newly widowed, from Auror, a village in an unnamed Eastern European country where the sawmill has closed and nothing is coming to replace it. He leaves his five year old daughter Maya with his mother and takes the coach west, two days and nights across Europe, to London, with a few hundred pounds, a photograph, and phrases from a guidebook.
Tremain then does something British fiction had barely bothered to do: she walks the reader through the entire machinery of economic migration from inside it. The hostel bed, the leaflet distribution job, the kebab shop, the fortune spent on a phone card, the English that improves in humiliating increments, and then the break: a dishwashing job at GK Ashe, a serious restaurant, where the tyrannical chef spots that Lev works like a man saving someone's life, because he is. The kitchen becomes his education, in food, in London, in the strange grammar of English kindness and rudeness, and an affair with a co worker gives him back his body and then breaks something else.
The turn comes in the fields, on a vegetable picking stint: Lev realises he does not want England, he wants to bring what England taught him home, and begins saving with a convert's ferocity to open a restaurant in Baryn, the town near his village.
Around three hundred and sixty pages, warm without being soft.
Best for readers who want the migrant's London mapped by someone who did the research and kept the jokes, and an ending that pays off honestly.
Historical Context & Significance
The Road Home won the Orange Prize in 2008, and part of its force was timing: Poland and its neighbours had joined the EU four years earlier, the Polish plumber was a tabloid fixture, and here was a major English novelist spending an entire novel inside the head the headlines were about. Some critics noted the risks of ventriloquism; more noted how thoroughly Tremain had done the work, and the book became one of the essential English novels of the migration decade.
It was also a corrective to her own reputation, since Rose Tremain was known above all as a historical novelist: Restoration, shortlisted for the Booker and filmed with Robert Downey Jr, and Music and Silence, which won the Whitbread. The Gustav Sonata later took the National Jewish Book Award. She was made a Dame in 2020, having served as Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, where she had both studied and taught, and The Road Home remains the book of hers that strangers on trains have most often actually read.