Audiobook: Rose Tremain: The Road Home

Lev is 42 and widowed. The sawmill where he worked has closed: there are no more jobs. Urgently needing to support his mother and daughter, he leaves his unnamed east-European country for London, a legal immigrant looking for work. He is an innocent, a dreamer, a good man.

Rose Tremain richly deserves her Orange prize for this magnificent novel. Bewildered and occasionally enraged by the casual cruelties he encounters, Lev is exploited, taunted, sacked from a job he loves and mugged. And yet his experiences are by no means all bad. An Indian landlady, a down-at-heel Irish plumber, an ancient lady in a care-home, a fashionable chef and a couple of Chinese asparagus-pickers all recognise the goodness in him, probably because he does the same for them. Though some let him down, he learns from them all and eventually his dogged diligence is rewarded.

The well-named Stephen Pacey is the perfect reader for this book. No accent of multi-cultural Britain is too much of a challenge, no subtlety of Tremain's superb writing escapes him. It's as if he's just spent a jocund night drinking vodka with Lev and his impossible friend Rudi, hearing the whole marvellous, tragic, joyous tale for the first time, and can't wait to tell us all about it.