Viking £12.99 pp326

Love makes Peter Pans of us all, and those worst afflicted by a return to unreasonable childishness are old men, who should know better but seldom do.

Certainly not Nikolai Mayevskyj, a Ukranian-born widower living in a pebble-dashed semi in Peterborough who has, according to his younger daughter, Nadezhda, “turned into an 84-year-old teenager”, because of his determination to marry a blowsy, 36-year-old gold-digging Ukranian whose UK visa is about to expire. But even before this Valentina came on the scene, brandishing her huge, exotically brassiered breasts, Nikolai and his daughters have never quite managed to be properly adult, which leads to mutual dissatisfaction. “I just want him to grow up,” 47-year-old Nadezhda whines about her father, while her sister, Vera, says to her “Will you never grow up?”, before scolding Nikolai, “Please try to act like an adult for once in your life.”

Fat chance. Earlier deprivation in the terror state that was Ukraine during the second world war has given the old man a maturity bypass and made him a fool for love. He is determined not to be deprived of anything ever again, especially Valentina, even though, unlike his virtuous and thrifty first wife, she serves boil-in-the-bag suppers and fleeces him royally out of his savings. Yet, in spite of his infantile and foolish yearnings, Nikolai is gleamingly intelligent, a clever engineer who, enlivened by his new romance, is writing the history of tractors in his native land that gives this remarkable first novel its title.

Vera, a flinty divorcée who is in a continuing state of exasperation towards her father, has inherited his belief that too much is never enough. She was a war baby, her early years spent perilously and hungrily in work camps, so there is no end to her desire for moneyed luxury, which she has been grabby enough to achieve. She doesn’t need Nikolai’s money but she takes a dim view of Valentina, who is soon demanding pricey consumer durables: “In former Soviet Union all cookers are white. Crap cookers . . . For civilised person, cooker must be gas, must be brown.”

Nadezhda, the book’s narrator, is mushier than her older sister. Born in England after the war, she lives in a state of wilful ignorance regarding her family’s nightmare history. A sociology lecturer married to a kind husband who cooks polenta, she is reduced “to a bogey-nosed four-year-old” when Vera is around, so contact between the two sisters has been limited. Valentina’s arrival, though, draws them into an edgy closeness. “Marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families,” Nadezhda observes. She is thinking about Romeo and Juliet but what ensues after the ill- advised nuptials take place is more like a knockabout version of King Lear, as Nikolai’s daughters try to prise him away from his grasping wife.

This involves a distasteful bid to get Valentina deported, with liberal Nadezhda taking on the role of “Mrs Flog-’em-and-send-’em home”, a part that doesn’t play well with her Oxfam wardrobe and muzzy sympathies. She learns the horrible lesson that to grow up is to see your ideals as a luxury you can no longer afford.

Marina Lewycka’s authorial voice is pragmatic but never indulgent. Greedy Valentina is seen as a victim as much as a predator, Nikolai as needy as well as deranged. In his history of tractors, he describes how these peaceful machines are easily transformed into tanks. This lovely novel leaves you with the wistful belief that, if the world could only be governed by real grown-ups, tanks could, just as easily, be turned back into tractors.

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