The Transformations

I have such a strong memory of reading an advance copy of Andrew Pippos’s debut novel, Lucky’s, in the middle of the difficult year that was 2020. It picked me up by the bootstraps and reminded me during those rough days that it is books like this that make me love my job. That brilliant, warm, epic piece of writing went on to win The Readings New Australian Fiction Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award of the same year, and was embraced by our judges, staff, and customers alike. We have all been waiting to see what Pippos does next, and here it is: The Transformations. Friends, this is a truly superb second novel which cements Pippos’s reputation as one of our most exciting chroniclers of the Australian experience and psyche and all its foibles, a storyteller of the highest order. I have fallen for The Transformations in a big way: it’s that good.

The novel is set in and around the newsroom of a fictional daily newspaper, The National, at a time of rapid change in the print media industry during the 2010s. George Desoulis is a subeditor in his mid-30s. He keeps to himself, admires his colleagues, believes in his work and the labour of the journalist’s calling. A late-night encounter with a colleague, Cassandra, marks a turning point in his life, as he finds an unexpected but intense connection with this woman who has children and a marriage and an agreed set of parameters with her husband around non-monogamy. George knows this is tricky – could it ever work? Is it wise to try to find out? – but he’s drawn, seemingly beyond his control, curious to see what happens. This is progress though. George has been alone, closed off; we soon learn his youth and innocence was cut short at an early age, by grief, by abuse suffered at the hands of a trusted teacher, and then by a relationship in his late teens and twenties that resulted in a daughter, who is now a teenager and lives with her mother. Might this relationship hold the promise of George’s becoming?

The characters in The Transformations are so clearly imagined, and the attachment I developed for them is one of the reasons I couldn’t put this book down: they’re flawed and lovable and affecting in ways that are familiar and emotionally charged, while Pippos’s particular skill for capturing the nuance of Australia’s migrant experience through the generations is again on show here. If the human condition is marked by the commonality and inevitability of change – one kind of transformation to which the book’s title alludes – then Pippos has found a way to describe and illuminate how this is felt by his characters. It’s a wonderful feat, arresting these moments on the page, as time moves on: the transformational affect, the feelings between the before and the after find their language in this book. The past, in its recurrence through memory and the traces it leaves in the mind and the body, is never too far from the surface, influencing thoughts, feelings, becoming the reason for change itself; the intimate and the monumental, the personal and the cultural, always in tension, and always on the way to somewhere or something else. There are some brilliant descriptions of the workings of the newsroom and print media too that I won’t soon forget, now experiences largely consigned to history I’m sure, but here is a record of how the end days of print media played out, amid the everyday lives of the people who worked in it and for it. And at the end of it all – as it is in life and as it was in Lucky’s too – is love. One of the great books and reading highlights of my 2025: I hope you’ll fall for it too.