In the fading glow of Australia’s print journalism era, The National is more than a newspaper-it’s an institution, and the only place that George Desoulis has felt at home. A world-weary subeditor with a poetic streak and a painful past, George is one of nature’s loners. As George grapples with shifting newsroom dynamics, the legacy of clerical abuse at his childhood school resurfaces, and a late-night encounter with a journalist named Cassandra begins to unravel his carefully managed solitude. As his colleagues depart and the final decline of the paper plays out, George is obliged to navigate an affair, learn to care for a daughter who has only recently become part of his life, and reckon with his own childhood trauma. The Transformations is a witty, melancholic, and very human novel about the stories we tell of ourselves. With an anthropologist’s eye for detail and a novelist’s grasp of emotional complexity, he explores generational change, grief, guilt, and the strange intimacy of workplace life.
