Book Reviews
Journeys like Lev's are very much a part of Britain's present reality, with discussion of the Eastern European invasion appearing all over. But Tremain elevates the subject beyond its outlines by making Lev not a statistic or a caricature or the standard-bearer of a trend but simply a man—fully embodied, his ignoble and noble acts presented without exaggeration, without excessive praise or condemnation.... A less disciplined and agile author might have been tempted to ease Lev's transition from daydreamer to doer. Or she might have jollied Lev into a toque at London's River Cafe and set Rudi up as a chauffeur on Belisha Road. But Rose Tremain is in the business of inventing not so much fantasies as alternate realities.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times
Rose Tremain brings the full tone and range of her novelist's imagination to bear on Lev, giving him, besides his enduring and endearing grief, humour, a romantic temperament, a genius for intimate male friendship and a poets' eye for images.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
A classic work by the gifted Tremain.... She has the art of finding the improbable graces in human connection.
Guardian (UK)
This is a finely balanced novel of urgent humanity.... The Road Home should keep you gripped...and fraught with anxious sympathy.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
The pleasure, the wit and the joy in humanity that Tremain brings to every page do what literature, at its best, should do: connect us, as E.M. Forester famously exhorted.
Stacey D'Erasmo - Los Angeles Times
It's not difficult to see why author Rose Tremain won the Orange Prize—a prestigious British fiction award--for her latest novel, The Road Home. From page one, Tremain plunges readers deep into the journey of Lev, an immigrant from an unnamed Eastern European country.... An unexpected, poignant story.
Allecia Vermillion - Chicago Sun Times
Tremain transforms this episodic road story into a gem of a novel, driven by a memorable character whose caring and ambition move him from a difficult personal situation and damaging historical past toward a positive new life.
Robert Allen Papinchak - Seattle Times
Why do I love Rose Tremain? It's not just the clarity of her prose, the liveliness of her plots, the precision of her settings, or the depth of her characters. I love Tremain because she is so compassionate. Her novels exemplify this moral quality, even as they excel at all the others.
Susan Balee - Philadelphia Inquirer
Tremain's protagonists are often faced with trials that have a fabled quality...and her latest novel is no exception...At once timeless and bitingly contemporary, this novel explores the life now lived by millions—when one's hope lies in one country and one's heart in another.
The New Yorker
Tremain (Restoration) turns in a low-key but emotionally potent look at the melancholia of migration for her 14th book. Olev, a 42-year-old widower from an unnamed former east bloc republic, is taking a bus to London, where he imagines every man resembles Alec Guinness and hard work will be rewarded by wealth. He has left behind a sad young daughter, a stubborn mother and the newly shuttered sawmill where he had worked for years. His landing is harsh: the British are unpleasant, immigrants are unwelcome, and he's often overwhelmed by homesickness. But Lev personifies Tremain's remarkable ability to craft characters whose essential goodness shines through tough, drab circumstances. Among them are Lydia, the fellow expatriate; Christy, Lev's alcoholic Irish landlord who misses his own daughter; and even the cruelly demanding Gregory, chef-proprietor of the posh restaurant where Lev first finds work. A contrived but still satisfying ending marks this adroit emigre's look at London.
Publishers Weekly
A displaced European's Candide-like progress through contemporary London is charted in this ambitious novel from the Whitbread Award-winning British author (The Colour, 2003, etc.). The protagonist is Lev, a recently widowed and also jobless former sawmill worker. He has left his young daughter and his (also widowed) mother behind (in a generically economically disadvantaged country that is and isn't Poland), hoping to find work and send money home. Debarking from the Trans-Euro bus on which he meets a similarly down-at-heels countrywoman (Lydia, who'll re-enter Lev's new life at variously crucial moments), Lev acquires a fragile living working as a distributor of leaflets, as a dishwasher, and so on, slowly ascending the ladder of minimal solvency, making a painstaking adaptation to a society that seems, to his bemused view, inexplicably self-indulgent, pampered and unmotivated. While sticking close to Lev's roiling thought processes, Tremain simultaneously constructs a subtly detailed mosaic of personal and cultural distinctions and conflicts-notably in Lev's cautious approach to reclaiming a sex life (perhaps even a love life?) and in generously developed conversations between Lev and his fulsome Irish landlord, bibulous plumber and compulsive worrywart Christy Slane. The novel's texture is further enriched by lengthy flashbacks spun from Lev's wistful memories, which acquaint us more fully with his warmhearted late wife Marina and his best friend Rudi, a resourceful hustler whose busy head is filled with visions of all things American, and foolproof scams by which such riches may be acquired. Rudi is an ingenious comic counterpart to Candide's annoyingly optimistic mentor Pangloss, and the novel dances into vigorous life whenever he takes hold of it. Still, Lev offers readers ample reason to get lost in this immensely likable novel's many pleasures. One of the best from the versatile Tremain, who keeps on challenging herself, and rewarding readers.
Kirkus Reviews