Rose Tremain is a novelist of style, ambition and lyrical sensibility whose books have often recreated distant times and places (17th-century England, Denmark, 19th-century New Zealand). But she has also written about the harshness of recent times, most notably in Sacred Country, about a transgendered girl in the mid-20th century. The Road Home moves to the leading edge of contemporary history, focusing on the Britain that is being created as legal migrants from the new greater Europe stream across our borders. It is a risky undertaking, but the resulting story is enjoyable and gripping, with an impressively wide range of characters (African kitchen workers, Indian sellers of financial services, gay Chinese agricultural labourers) who for the most part touch and engage us.

Lev and Lydia, early-middle-aged Poles, begin as accidental fellow passengers on the coach bringing them to London. Lev is a shy widower and former sawmill-worker, Lydia is a teacher and translator. Both are trying to make new lives. The odd medley of self-made Britons who got here before them welcomes the new arrivals: sometimes doubtfully or aggressively, but in Tremain’s account more often kindly and even hungrily, for Lev and Lydia have things we need – energy, resourcefulness, hope. And it is two-way traffic. Migrants have a chance to go back home with the new skills and money they require to kickstart the economy. Lev moves from washing up to preparing vegetables in a top-flight restaurant, avidly absorbing what he will need to know to run his own business. Lydia’s formal education and culture is less valued than Lev’s vigour in a 21st-century London where the equivalents of the old Polish aristocrats are celebrity chefs, meretricious conceptual artists and paedophilia-prone playwrights.

Artistically, I had cavils about the balance between realism and literary framing. Tremain’s lyrical prose sometimes sits uncomfortably within the consciousness of her male protagonist. I did not believe that Lev, rather than his creator, saw himself in the mirror as “a young man, eyes wild with dreams”. Some of the dialogue, too, is more literary than real. When Lev tries the English phrase “B&B”, Lydia corrects him “You mean ‘to be or not to be’ ”, thus setting up a recurrent analogy between Hamlet and the condition of exile, but also violating plausibility, not for the only time. However, Tremain is too tough-minded to write a fairy tale, and her poetic imagination is precisely the quality that allows her to see courage and beauty in her protagonists’ search for a better future, and that helps her apprehend the brutal and pointless sides of our own culture as experienced by visitors from less decadent countries. This is a generous, sweet-tempered book, giving a human face to the faceless, moving its readers with the individual voyages within large movements of migration – and finally giving us what our affection for the characters makes us crave, a satisfyingly unglib, unpredictable happy ending.

The Road Home by Rose Tremain

Chatto £16.99 pp354

Available at the Books First price of £15.29 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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