'Lucky's is a story of family. A story about migration.
'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, (at last).' (Publication summary)
Dedication : For Renee
Epigraph :
'Thus Don Quixote becomes a knight... - Simon Leys'
'There is a peculiar practice in immigrant Sydney that I know well thanks to being born to a pair of Lebanese settlers. It is when a set of beliefs that parents hold true about other ethnicities (usually groups of people who migrated earlier than they did) are told to their children as a kind of forewarning. For example, as my father drove along Burwood Road to drop me off at Christian Brothers College, he would point at the cluster of Asian shops and say, ‘In business, Chinese are the most cunning.’ This probably would have made a lot more sense to me had my father ever engaged in ‘business’ but he hadn’t which meant he had inherited that saying from some other Lebanese man in a TAB somewhere who had probably heard the same from another Lebanese man and I suppose it could probably be traced to some misadventure of business between two eager men from different parts of the world. When my father said these things, I would nod. As would my sisters and cousins and any other third culture kids splattered around Sydney when their elders spoke these varyingly racist beliefs. We would nod. Not because we agreed, but because very early on as Australian-born children, we knew we would never speak the same language as our parents, that we were somehow more accepting than them if not purely by default of grazing our knees on the diverse playgrounds of Sydney’s schools.' (Introduction)
'In Andrew Pippos’s immersive and multi-layered début novel, Lucky’s, a tragic shooting that occurs in the last bastion of a Greek-Australian restaurant franchise becomes the fulcrum around which mental health, heartbreak, displacement, and toxic masculinity are explored.' (Introduction)
'In Lucky’s, the debut novel of Sydney writer Andrew Pippos, the story is split between Lucky, the man behind the Lucky’s restaurant franchise, and Emily, jetting in from London in 2002 to write a New Yorker piece on the demise of the chain.' (Introduction)
'F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that he once thought there were no second acts in American lives. But what of third or fourth acts? Or the lives of Greek Americans migrating to Australia? Such are the conundrums driving Andrew Pippos’s debut novel, a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves and the lives they shape.' (Publication summary)
‘A must-read saga, and a gripping monument to Greek diaspora’
