What a let-down!

I ordered The Road Home with the usual expectations that one would have for a book by an admired author. But, oh dear. It is unbelievable at so many levels, as well as schematic and sentimental.
There are irritating little mistakes of fact that Rose Tremain shouldn't make: London underground trains running on Christmas Day; a man's mobile is stolen, he gets another and is instantly rung on it, even though of course the sim card will have remained in the stolen phone so no one would know his new number...and so on. But then, take her main character, Lev, who comes from an unnamed Baltic country which has just become an EU accession state: he was latterly a manual worker in a wood mill, until it closed because there were no trees left to process, yet his speech patterns (in his native tongue) veer from the almost stupid to the incredibly wordy; his inner life doesn't seem to belong to a man of his life experience and background.
He falls for a young, plump kitchen worker in an upmarket restaurant where he does the washing up. She speaks of 'emporia'! Really? I doubt she'd know the word, and if she did, she'd say 'emporiums'. There is something astonishingly cloth-eared in the dialogue, as if all the accents and dialect Tremain gives her characters came out of a handbook.
But it's plot more than anything that enrages. One can see every twist and turn coming, down to the gift to Lev of money from a wealthy old woman in a nursing home for whom he has cooked good meals; down to the uncanny physical similarity between a young waitress he meets on his return home to his beloved but deceased wife; down to his keen-eyed observation of the cooking that goes on in the kitchen where he washed up to his own future proficiency as a chef. I closed the book in something approaching fury.