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Marina Lewycka, the never-been-published-before bestselling novelist of 2006, is trying to remember where the hell she saw those caravans. “It wasn’t far away,” she says, “but I can tell you it was extremely muddy.”

“I’ve got my boots on,” says Sophie, the Times photographer, encouragingly. But Marina, whose accent is four fifths plummy southerner and one fifth Yorkshire pit, and whose Ukrainian surname is pronounced Lewitzka, doesn’t hear. “I wonder where else I’d find a caravan if I can’t find those,” she says. “I think I know where they are. Because if they’re not there I don’t know where else we could go. Quite often they have them on farms. I don’t know where else I’d find caravans if not in Derbyshire.”

How far is Derbyshire? We’re in Sheffield, where Lewycka lives with her New Zealander husband, Dave, but since we came up on the train without a map or any inkling of where the perhaps misremembered caravan-strewn patch of Derbyshire is, “Derbyshire” could be anywhere.

“It’s about half an hour,” says Marina, more definitely now.

“They do sound great, those caravans,” Sophie says, brightly.

“We can go off on a search, anyway,” Lewycka decides. “We can do that. We can go and look at some caravans.” She calls up to Dave, who is lingering invisibly at the top of the staircase, for more caravan information. His response is inaudible. Reassured, she returns to the kitchen: “Excuse me, I think I’m going to finish my sandwich,” she says, slicing the sandwich in two to share. “Look, half and half?”

It is notoriously impossible to predict with any real accuracy what will fly off the shelves at bookstores, and the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, for one, had reasons to believe that A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian, Lewycka’s sensational debut, had all the ingredients of a catastrophic dud. When she sent off her manuscript to Kavanagh’s offices she received a straight rejection — unnecessarily crushing, I thought, for containing the words “we cannot summon sufficient enthusiasm”.

Lewycka suspects that her precious manuscript went straight into the slush pile unread: “I think editors and agents only want to commission books.”

Besides, here was an author with not a single USP, so essential in the promotions war. Not only was she unknown and comparatively old, but she had an unglamorous job — lecturing in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University, née Polytechnic. To top it off, the unknown, unglamorous border-line-OAP was also a failed novelist, as evidenced by the three unpublished works and sheaf of poetry stuffed into her drawer. “There’s something quite contemptible about unpublished writers,” she says.

Initially one can imagine that the title might have jarred with non-forward-thinking agents, being, as it was, confusing enough to inspire the wrath of half a dozen farmers who bought it accidentally, having mistaken it for a tractor manual. Satisfyingly for Lewycka, everyone is copying her now, competing to give their novels the most ironically boring title of all time: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers; Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, and so on.

I’ll get back to the story of how the book was eventually published later, but still Lewycka can’t quite understand how she hit the jackpot. In an article she wrote shortly after it appeared — a period in which she was handed the excruciating task of attending Britain’s best book group to discuss her work, in return for having been shortlisted for the Orange Prize (she was also long-listed for the Booker) — she questions the legitimacy of calling herself an “author” at all.

Two years on, she has settled into the role more comfortably, although she says that people still “expect you to be a bit different and a genius and stuff”. And it is true that Lewycka diverges from the authorial stereotype on almost all counts. She writes not in an office but in bed on a laptop, which she rests on the kind of tray-on-a-beanbag more often used for TV dinners. She is not dishevelled, esoteric or introverted. Instead she comes across as bold and bossy and sensible, possibly a control freak in private, offering sandwiches and playing mother.

Before we get into the car to find caravans in Derbyshire, she mock-reprimands Sophie for her low-slung trousers: “Young people — you wear these silly trousers that sit on your hips. You’ve got to tie them round your waist, you know. You need a belt!”

Sophie needs a belt and we all need a caravan, preferably two, because the name of Lewycka’s new book is Two Caravans and a picture of her beside them would be thematically apt. Also, Lewycka is mad about caravans — as mad as she seems to be about most things, except for London, where her sister lives: “Why would anybody want to live in London?”

When her daughter was a child 25 years ago “we used to go on holiday in these rented caravans in Devon, on a farm”. For the new novel those caravans were transported in her mind’s eye to Kent, where they are inhabited by foreign farm labourers.

Later, over tea in a nearby village, she says: “You know Dog, the original dog in the story? He used to live here.” As we drive towards the Peak District in search of caravans, it transpires that a lot of things, especially in her first book, have an original” in real life. When I ask about her family and the journey from a refugee camp in Kiel, where she was born, to Britain, she refers me to Tractors: all of it is “in the book”. But how can it be in the book? Isn’t the book fiction?

This is the difficulty with fiction: when it turns out to be fact. Or at least, some of it — a great deal — turns out to be fact, and when you subsequently ask which bits are real, and the person you are asking says: “I don’t really want to go into that. It will put me in a difficult position.”

It becomes even more of a difficulty when you realise how many striking similarities there are between the book and the life of the person who wrote it. So, for example, in real life Lewycka has a laid-back husband called Dave and an only daughter called Sonia. In the book, the first-person narrator, Nadezhda, a lecturer at something called Anglia Polytechnic University, has a laid-back husband called Mike and an only daughter called Anna. In both versions she has an older sister to whom she does not feel particularly close. In the book, Vera, the fictitious sister, gets quite a thumping.

Within the first chapter we learn that the sisters haven’t spoken in two years because of an argument after the death of their mother, and I wonder if the argument might have happened in real life, too, and whether the strained silence has been extended indefinitely in the wake of what Lewycka wrote in her book.

The father is key.In fiction, as in reality, he is an octogenarian émigré widower — an engineer who has written a book on tractors and is charmed by, then later marries, a young Eastern European woman. In the book the siren is a Ukrainian called Valentina. In real life the new wife was called Svitlana. In both versions she pressurises her husband to buy a Jaguar, and has a child from a previous marriage. In both versions the ill-matched couple are eventually divorced after the young bride is accused of threatening her husband with violence.

Of course, we’d have known none of this if the child in real life, Eleonora, had not this year fought a fairly public and eventually successful battle to have her deportation order lifted. Jeremy Paxman took up her cause, at which point the tabloids went to talk to a neighbour of Lewycka’s father, who confirmed that “Svitlana bought a Jaguar car and left it out in front of the house for everyone to see”. The solicitor for Lewycka’s father in the subsequent divorce case said: “The court refused to grant Svitlana Sukhoviy any financial settlement.”

How did Lewycka’s family react when they saw the book? “They asked me to make some changes, which I did,” she says. One can imagine that perhaps they asked her to not to publish it at all. “It’s really difficult. I wouldn’t have been that happy [if I were them]. They behaved very well.”

“Behaved” is a slightly odd word to use in this context and brings me back to a bit in Tractors. Nadezhda says: “Now that Mother has died, Big Sis has become the guardian of the family archive, the spinner of stories, the custodian of the narrative that defines who we are. This role, above all others, is one that I envy and resent. It is time, I think, to find out the whole story, and to tell it in my own way.” It was certainly wise to call it a novel.

Tractors did OK in hardback, then shot into the Top Ten in paperback, where it dropped out only to return with a vengeance. One can imagine that it generated some seriously awkward moments for the rest of the family when it became clear that the whole country was going to read the book. Did it? “I think if I’d known it was going to be such a huge success I probably wouldn’t have written it.”

What we seem to have here is a James Frey in reverse. Frey’s book, A Million Little Pieces, was the bestselling memoir that turned out to have been heavily fictionalised.

What Tractors does perhaps best of all is to deal with the subject of an ageing parent’s resurgent sexuality. And this, too, is something that Lewycka found hard to handle in reality. “I didn’t want my father to remarry,” she says. “It’s this thing about thinking about your parents having a sex life.”

Valentina, says Lewycka, is in fact modelled on Anna Nicole-Smith rather than Svitlana. She adds: “I really like Valentina a lot” — although Valentina is considered such a negative character in Ukraine that publishers there refuse to touch the book, even though it has been translated into 29 languages worldwide.

If Tractors reads like a memoir, that’s because it was originally conceived as one: “The breakthrough came when I realised that I was allowed to make things up.”

The other breakthrough came when she was required to send an example of her work to be assessed by an outside examiner as part of a creative writing course she was taking. He replied saying that he thought it was great and, by the way, he was a literary agent. Could he represent her?

Two Caravans did not start out as a memoir. It has nine plotlines and follows the lives of Chinese, Polish and Ukrainian immigrant workers in Britain’s strawberry fields and chicken factories. Lewycka has never worked in a chicken factory “but I was a sausage-twister in a sausage factory when I was at school. It was really, really awful. You stood on duckboards above this festering grey water full of remnants, and you just chucked things on the floor.

“This is one of the things I wanted to do in Two Caravans , because the people there were so degraded that they start to degrade the work process. The guys used to blow their noses in the pastry that the pork pies were made out of.”

I can’t imagine Lewycka doing something as anarchic as that: she is far too well brought-up. “I live this very middle class life and I don’t see what goes on,” she concedes. “So I’m very glad that there have been times in my life when I have seen it.”

We eventually find the caravans. They are abandoned shells left on some farm-land, and Lewycka is ecstatic, especially about an old green one that was last inhabited in 1971, to judge from the soggy copies of Reader’s Digest inside.

It’s a tip, but Lewycka loves it. It reminds her — if it’s possible to be reminded of a past that never existed — of the other life she might have led as a Ukrainian in Britain. This is what the second book is all about.

She has shown she can draw skilfully from real life. The question is, can she draw as compellingly from her imagination?

Two Caravans by Marina Lewycka, Figtree, £16.99; available from Times BooksFirst for £15.29 incl p&p: 0870 1608080; www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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