First Book Club: Lucky’s (with Andrew Pippos)

“I wanted to write about how someone changes over the course of a life, and how a culture changes.”

Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings First Book Club. For November that debut is Lucky’s by Andrew Pippos, out now from Picador Australia.

Lucky’s is an exuberant, magical Australian saga about migration, mystery, tragedy and love spanning over 80 years. It is also about a man called Lucky. His restaurant chain. A fire that changed everything. A New Yorker article which might save a career. The mystery of a missing father. An impostor who got the girl. An unthinkable tragedy. A roll of the dice. And a story of love—lost, sought and won again.

Thanks for joining us for the KYD First Book Club this year. We’ll be back in 2021 with more fabulous debut books! Our theme song is Broke for Free’s ‘Something Elated’.

Further reading:

Read Ellen Cregan’s review of Lucky’s in our November Books Roundup.

Read Andrew’s Shelf Reflection on his reading habits and the writing that inspires him.

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TRANSCRIPT

(Music)

Alice Cottrell: Welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings Podcast. I’m KYD publisher Alice Cottrell and today. I’ll be bringing you our November First Book Club interview. Our pick this month is Lucky’s by Andrew Pippos, out now from Pan Macmillan. Lucky’s is an exuberant, magical Australian saga. A story of migration, mystery, tragedy and love. First Book Club host Ellen Cregan spoke with Andrew to ask him about the book.

Ellen Cregan: Hi Andrew, thanks for joining me today.

Andrew Pippos: Thank you for having me.

EC: We’re just going to start with a reading from the book.

AP: He still had time to make changes. Not to his nickname, which he could never shake, and not to his appearance, and there was little prospect of changing the flaws in his character, since the time had passed for great internal transformations, but Vasilis ‘Lucky’ Mallios supposed he could fix his own story—to be specific, how it ended.

Lucky sat tucked at his kitchen table, newspaper spread across the surface, stripping rigani from the stalks. The herbs had hung inside a cupboard for a week-not long enough to properly dry, but he couldn’t wait; this old ritual was necessary. It offered a moment’s accord with the past. He placed the stalks to one side and picked through the heap of flower-heads, plucking out grey twigs, as the smell drifted up like the spirit of someone dead. The apartment now otherworldly, dense with human life. He told himself we all have missing people: Our dead parents, or the spouse who left too soon, or the lover who betrayed us, the sibling who deserted the family, the friend we never found, the friend who walked away, the child we didn’t have, the person we couldn’t become the life we should have led. Or the missing person might yet arrive: The child we still could have, the family we were about to find, the lover or destroyer coming to the door. Lucky could briefly accept that his world was incomplete, and he waited for this moment to end before he switched on his television.

That afternoon he had rushed home from the bank appointment and straightaway cut down the rigani from the cupboard near the kitchen window. The expansive new apartment complex opposite looked like a tower with its pockets turned out. Lucky’s own building reminded him of a motor inn.

The Suncorp Bank loan officer had been kind when rejecting his application. The officer cited Lucky’s lack of income in the past twenty-four months, without stating that he was too old anyway to take on substantial debt. He possessed no assets; there was no loan guarantor. The officer said she liked the idea of a person starting over. She couldn’t be more sympathetic. Her parents, on special occasions, used to take the family