The Lucky Child

• Marianne Apostolides
• Mansfield Press, 2010
• Paperback, 204 pages
• 9781894469470

How do we construct the story of ourselves and our countries? How do we know our histories, our memories, our identities? These are the questions that compelled Marianne Apostolides to ask her father about his childhood in wartime Greece. Her probing unleashed a torrent of stories he’d kept hidden, even from himself — stories about honour, bravery, vengeance and betrayal. The Lucky Child tells this tale with honesty and ambiguity. It is a novel that resonates with a deeper “truth”: the truth of our universal need to question and engage, to create our own meaning through shared story.

Marianne Apostolides is a writer and critic whose first book was published by W.W. Norton and translated into Spanish and Swedish. Her current writing explores the ‘contact zone’ between genres — poetry vs. prose, fiction vs. non-fiction, creative vs. critical; it has appeared in The Walrus, Room, and Bookninja.com Magazine among other publications. She lives in Toronto with her two children.