The novel is a strange hybrid, both determinedly contemporary and oddly old-fashioned. She has been hired to help in Richard’s latest money-making scheme: a taxidermy business. Mirka assumes she will be a cook or perhaps an au pair, but when she arrives she discovers that the couple have no children. The only stipulation made by her future employers is that she is not squeamish about touching dead animals. After a stint at a fast food restaurant in London she accepts an agency job as an “assistant” to Richard and Sophie Parker at Fairmont Hall, a decaying country house in the middle of nowhere. Mirka is a 19-year-old from Slovakia who has broken with her family and come to England to make a new life. I had high hopes, therefore, for Laura Kaye’s debut novel. There are some notable exceptions – Rose Tremain’s The Road Home and the slyly comic novels of Marina Lewycka, herself the daughter of Ukrainian refugees – but for the most part their stories have remained untold, surfacing in print only as news bulletins and statistics. G iven the extent of the economic migration from eastern Europe to Britain since the opening of labour markets in 2004, and the debates about freedom of movement across Europe that have continued to dominate the political agenda since the Brexit referendum, it is perhaps surprising that the experiences of these new arrivals have not been more thoroughly explored in fiction, at least in English.
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