Andrew Pippos explores love, loss, and change in his second novel

Andrew Pippos returns with a second novel, The Transformations, released last month, with critics calling it one of the reading highlights of 2025 – glowing reviews like, Readings Books wrote it is “…a truly superb second novel which cements Pippos’s reputation as one of our most exciting chroniclers of the Australian experience.”

Lucky’s, Pippos’s debut novel in 2020, won the Readings Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Miles Franklin. A multi-generational story, it revolved around a man nicknamed Lucky and his pursuit of love and belonging as his fortunes in the café business rose and fell.

With The Transformations, Pippos once again captures the pulse of a world in flux, where endings make way for something uncertain and new.

“This time I wanted to write about the 21st century, and one of its defining events: the ongoing phenomenon of digital disruption,” Andrew Pippos said ahead of the launch.

“With Lucky’s, that defining event of the 20th century was the advent of multicultural societies. The Transformations has this backdrop of change, of technology reshaping the world as we know it. The newsroom and the decline of the daily newspaper seemed a perfect setting for that.”

“There are transformations in society and newspapers, and also transformations in people’s lives, and these changes interlock,” he said.

The author’s interest in fading worlds is instinctive he told Neos Kosmos. “I’m interested in decline, in change in people’s lives, and in society.”

The author says that once something is gone, “there’s a very human urge to hope for something new -not necessarily a perfect replacement—but for new experiences, for newness in general”.

“Because we’re still alive. We’re not ready to finish. And even though relationships end, jobs end, even institutions, there’s still a need for something else, something more.”

At its heart, The Transformations is a contemporary love story

Pippos says he is drawn obsolescence and decline “almost unconsciously”.

“I’m also drawn to the kind of literature that made me want to be a writer when I was a teenager. The great 19th century novels, but also classical Greek literature and Greek mythology more broadly.”

George Desoulis, his Greek Australian protagonist grew up in a world reminiscent of the cafés described in Lucky’s, is a world-weary subeditor, with a bookish sensibility and a painful past, whose life is shaken up by significant events propelling him towards change.

“George has good reasons for his flaws, but to grow he needs to change, to join the rest of the world and fulfil certain roles, as a lover, potentially a husband or father,” Pippos says.

“With Cassandra, if there is a flaw at the heart of her personality, it’s that she’s trying to be everything to everyone. She’s trying to do too much, and she thinks that she can get away with it, but that’s not the case.”

For the author bringing their connection to life was a matter of showing their compatibility yet, “leaving space for what can’t ever be fully explained in love”.

“I needed to explain how they were compatible-to dramatise their chemistry – I also needed to leave some mystery in their connection as well, that’s the case with romantic love in real life.”

Myth is threaded into through Pippos’s like echoes of the Electra and the story of Achilles.

What transforms us

We tend to all know that transformation and change are the only constants in our lives. “The friendships and the relationships I’ve had, have impacted, but my decision to commit to writing, shaped me.”

“Grief has shaped me, the loss of friends and the loss of my father and other relatives,” says Pippos.

Death made life precious for the author, he says, it gave him a different perspective on the world.

“It’s hard to understand the human experience fully until you lose someone you love, until you realise you’ll never see them again.”

For Pippos the experiences of grief changed him, “as well as fatherhood in the sense that you don’t really know what it’s like until it happens, and it is an enormously positive and joyful thing.”

Pippos approaches this new release with a calmly he says, the second book means he knows “what to expect”.

“It’s absolutely the book I wanted it to be – a more mature novel, character-based, and psychologically complex.”

*The Transformations, by Andrew Pippos was released on 28 October by Picador Australia.