The Transformations

Image credit: Harry Harthog

What better way to ring in the new year, then by closing the cover on a book? I had hoped to make this month’s bookclub read the last one of 2025, but it’s been a year and I threw in the towel at 11pm when my eyes and brain could not take in any more words.

2025 was a year in which a lot of things changed for me, there were a lot of upheavals, adjustments, and reshufflings. It’s kind of eerily apt that the final book I consumed this year was The Transformations by Andrew Pippos.

The story follows George Desoulis, a subeditor at The National and a functional loner by nature. His contented bubble of solitary routine is shaken up one night when he allows Cassandra Gwan, a self-assured journalist and coworker to enter it. Soon the two begin an unorthodox relationship, each becoming increasingly aware of the intimate ways in which they are transforming from one person to another, as they respond to the changing landscape of their jobs, their responsibilities to family, and the events of their past that still live in the dark corners of their characters.

I like to think of myself as an open reader, an eclectic in that I enjoy a variety of genres, writing styles, and author timbres. If I have learned anything about myself while reading this book, it is that I respond better to books that are not quite so calm and subtle. It’s a bit of a cliché, but this girl likes a bit of drama!

The Transformations is a book that explores the intricacies of emotional human development and how we are constantly morphing from one identity to another, creating a human-shaped papier mache of labels that bears a name. Pippos as an omniscient third-person narrator follows his romantic leads in equal measure as well as the supporting characters, giving readers a rich understanding of who these people are and what types of events and experiences have shaped them.

The prose is blunt with the odd adjective or adverb breathing life and personality into the scene. It’s a book in which the real stories are told between the lines, through subtle hints in dialogue or a throwaway sentence of self-analysing exposition. The problem that I encountered with this is that, while it made the book easy to read, I felt that the characters and the events that were taking place lacked personality, vibrance, and drama and thus, it was a bit hard to really become enveloped in the world of the book. I enjoyed reading it for reading’s sake, admiring the author’s literary craft rather than the story or characters he had created.

Image credit: Writing NSW

While I don’t believe that this is a book that I would revisit, I am pleased to have read it, taken a few life perspectives away from it, and been exposed to a new author who has a talent for conveying and traversing the finnicky emotional labyrinths of the human condition. The Transformations is a book that very simply explores the changing nature of relationships and boundaries of relationships, the decline of the newspaper as an institution, and the various ways in which change happens, sometimes suddenly sometimes unnoticed over time.

Author: Andrew Pippos, 2025

Published: Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd, 2025.