MEETING Marina Lewycka is like having an audience with someone's favourite auntie. She gives a twinkly smile, pours the tea and somehow within the first few minutes weaves a cosy little web of family around the conversation. You feel you could tell her anything.

But we're actually here to talk about her. Her first novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was one of the most talked about books of the last few years and her hotly anticipated second effort, Two Caravans -- which she has dedicated to the Morecambe Bay Cockle pickers -- has just come out to some glowing reviews.

As in her bestselling first novel, much of the humour in Marina's follow up novel comes from the malapropistic English used by the central characters and their romantic view of England in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

The central female character Irina longs for an Englishman as dashing as the Mr Brown from her book Let's Talk English. Instead, she gets exploitative farmers and clumsy come-ons from the men who confiscate her passport.

The second book however is less directly autobiographical -- it centres around a group of Eastern European, Asian and African workers forging new lives for themselves in England -- and delves into darker themes -- human trafficking, the slum-like conditions many immigrants are forced to live in and the brutality of intensive farming.

As with her first book, Marina shows a lightness of touch even when writing about these weighty and topical issues. The first book's success she tells me was "quite scary really" as it came after she had filed away veritable stack of rejection letters.

"I had years and years of not getting published and then all of a sudden when it all comes at once, it's overwhelming. I hadn't expected the tractors book to get published at all. I thought if anything we might get a small publishing house to take it up and maybe sell it on the internet and then it became, well, you know, a bestseller -- it's really quite embarrassing to say it, but that's what it was.,This stuttering modesty seems very English but as her name and her literary output suggests, Marina has an Eastern European heritage. Her parents fled Ukraine with their infant daughter at the end of the Second World War and after a spell in a refugee camp in Germany settled in England.

Her father found work as an agricultural labourer and her mother was employed as a domestic servant by the mother of English television personality Malcolm Muggeridge.

Growing up, she tells me, she had a sense of "life seen from below, life on the outside. People were mostly kind to us but sometimes in a slightly misguided way.

She is careful to add that her parents never saw themselves as victims. "I remember once a kid in school coming up to me and going (in mocking tones) 'your mummy cleans the toilets at the school' and there was nothing I could say back. It was true.

"But really things like that were exceptional. They didn't see themselves as downtrodden and I never saw them that way.,Determined that their daughter would have a better life Marina's parents encouraged her to work hard at school. "Oh, I was a terrible swot", she laughs, "and I was hated for it. But I would have been hated anyway. I looked peculiar with my long plaits and white socks.,In her teens she rebelled against her goody two shoes image. "I joined CND and went to London and lived in a crusty squat", she remembers somewhat wistfully.

She met her future husband, a New Zealander and fellow squat dweller on the upper deck of a double-decker bus in London. When she took him home to her parents he was able to put to them all of the questions that Marina had never trusted herself to ask.

"He just asked outright and they told him all sorts of stuff they never told me.,The results of her parents' recollections formed the basis for much of her first book, which she wrote while a lecturer in Public Relations at Sheffield Hallam University.

The success of her novels has enabled her to more or less give up the day job.

She is charmingly frank about her late success. "It is almost like becoming a virgin again I suppose," she laughs.

"I sometimes regret that I don't have more writing. It would have been nice if it had come earlier but maybe if I'd done this well when I was young it would have been all downhill thereafter.,"I suppose it is quite strange to go from picking peas in Lincolnshire as a young girl to sitting behind a computer writing novels, but you know I wouldn't have had it any other way. It was a privilege for me to have seen that life.,

Two Caravans, by Marina Lewycka, is published by Penguin Fig Tree, price €22.99