But like many immigrants, my parents believed that hard work and education were the keys to success in our new world. It’s about passion, compassion and human’s dreadful facility for cruelty – even the unintended kind.

There are also characters who are not even given this most basic, two-dimensional personality, they only exist as their name and function - like the completely superfluous narrator's husband. The main characters (both sisters, their dead mother and elderly father) are interesting and reasonably well developed, meaningful without sliding into caricature, apart perhaps from Valentina. It had an okay pace and style and a collection of interesting themes, but the themes were not developed and the characters were a little two dimensional.

Grief and death, separation from family members, living in fear, close ones disappearing in the dark of the night; they endured it all. Try to describe the state of their sisterhood at the end of the book and make some guesses about how it might continue to grow or evolve in the future. Have you ever had a conflict with a family member that you could not resolve without compromise, one profoundly rooted in the past? The father is particularly well drawn, a mixture of your standard dilapidated elderly man and intellectually sharp, slightly Aspergerish Eastern European intellectual.

Consider some of the times in which she seems to analyze circumstances more as a professional and others in which she responds less rationally.Delightful, moving, funny and utterly unforgettable, A Short History is a book that will resonate with me for a long time to come. I did also notice quite a few instances when the first-person narrator suddenly became rather omniscient, giving us the emotions and feelings of the people she comes in contact with even though she has no way of actually knowing them. Marina Lewycka was born in Kiel, Germany, after the Second World War, and moved to England with her family when she was about a year old.