Andrew Pippos’s debut novel Lucky’s charmed readers with its fusion of Greek tragedy and multigenerational heft. Five years later, he has navigated the notoriously difficult expectations around second novels with aplomb, delivering a sensitive portrayal of professional and personal change, albeit on a smaller canvas.
The Transformations is set in Darlinghurst in 2014, in the newsroom of a fictional broadsheet newspaper, the National. Pippos’s focus is on amiable everyman George, a 35-year-old subeditor who works the night shift. After six years with the paper, he’s yet to become as jaded as some of his colleagues and ekes out a conscientious living as part of the production crew. He takes pride in his job and his industry, marvelling at how “everyone in the newsroom was engaged in the incredible task of describing the world each day”.
