LIKE the strawberries that bring together its disparate characters, Marina Lewycka's Two Caravans is both sweet and tart, with a persistent aftertaste that rather unsettles the stomach even as it leaves the reader hungry for more.

The 61-year-old Briton of Ukrainian heritage scored a runaway hit in 2005 with her debut novel, A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian.

As in that book, this one also puts the spotlight on immigrants and their quests for better lives.

Two Caravans opens with the arrival of 19-year-old Irina, a newly recruited berry-picker, at a verdant strawberry field in Kent during the height of summer.

Hailing from Ukraine's capital, Kiev, the pampered aspiring novelist and only daughter of a professor is looking for adventure before she starts university.

Her rather romanticised view of England and its inhabitants is largely based on the handsome Mr Brown character in her Let's Talk English textbook.

However, instead of a bowler-hatted Englishman, she finds an assembly culled from various developing nations, quartered in his- and-hers caravans in situ, and with plenty of cultural and personal disagreements which find expression in mangled English.

Though the work is laborious and the farmer retains most of their pay for 'living expenses' - not to mention the fact that most are in debt to the agencies that faked the necessary employment papers - their existence is idyllic compared to what happens after they are exiled from the field as not-so- innocent bystanders to a marital spat.

The book changes seamlessly from a tale of petty politics to that of a picaresque journey, and the multinational contingent trundles off in the farmer's Land Rover, caravan in tow.

As they lurch to Dover, London and then Sheffield, with a detour to Peterborough to meet the protagonist of A Short History, the band thins as various characters depart in search of something better. Unfortunately, some fates are more heartbreaking than most.

The novel is less depressing to read than it should be. Lewycka's droll and dark humour, which was what made her debut such a riveting, juicy read, is as black as pitch here.

Her descriptions of the Polish fruit pickers' experiences at a chicken processing plant are macabre enough to give Fast Food Nation's Eric Schlosser a run for his money. Be warned that the phrase 'playing the bagpipes' will never sound the same again.

But gallows humour aside, this is ultimately a book imbued with hope. It is not the against-all-odds, triumph-of-the-human-spirit kind of hope, however, but an altogether more desperate variety.

It is the kind born of having nothing to lose, the kind that compels people to leave their homes to look for a better life somewhere else. Sometimes, they find it.

If you like this, read: Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (2002, $20.48 with GST, Books Kinokuniya)

Narrated in gloriously mangled English by a Ukrainian student, the novel traces a young Jewish American's journey through Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

TWO CARAVANS
By Marina Lewycka
Fig Tree/Paperback/ 310 pages/
$30.50 (without GST)/
Major bookstores