A heartwrenching tale of a family's dissolution told from a child's crystalline perspective. Luck is the beautiful, bittersweet, and very funny novel about a nuclear family living in a small German townwonderfully translated by Gert Hofmann's son, acclaimed translator and poet Michael Hofmann. It begins and ends on the same day, the "last day" of the narrator's childhood as he prepares to leave home with Father, because Mother is waiting for her new man to arrive, and his sister will stay behind. Or will they really leave? Mother sits in her room, squirting herself with perfume. Father endlessly postpones his packing, hoping for a magical conversation that will mend his marriage. His little sister spits on her new dress, and asks....

Gert Hofmann (1931-1993) was a German writer and educator. He worked for a time for the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer in modern German literature and has received many awards, most recently the Independent Foreign Fiction Award in 1996 for "The Film Explainer."