"…in Queanbeyan, Helen Kalasoudas couldn’t break even; down in Mildura, Jim Melemenis got himself into trouble with the Italians; Mick Papacostas and his brothers were playing too much dice in Camperdown…"
Setting sun, Geilston Bay. August 2021. Lucky's by Andrew Pippos Another book that chooses to advance its story irregularly. Dynamically shifting timelines are so typical these days that I am unsure whether the word irregular fits anymore! We primarily dwell in 2002, where the unmoored Emily leaves her failing marriage in the UK to set about researching and writing a New Yorker article about the rise and fall of a now-defunct Australian chain of family restaurants, one that ended in a mass shooting. Shadowing this journey is the mystery of her long-dead father's interest in what seems to be nothing more than a little bit of trivia on the other side of the world. From here, we jump back first to 1944 for a while, then back twenty years previously as we get our heads around the Greek diaspora. Between zipping back and forth to 2002, we spend a bit of time in the 1940s and 1950s on the emergence of the Lucky's empire and dissolution of a marriage. More...