At the time of the Lenin Peak avalanche, I was a twenty-seven-year-old seeking adventure. I’d grown up in Argentina, come to the U.S. for college, and gotten bored with a tech job in Silicon Valley. So I’d embarked on a gap year of sorts to backpack around Asia while I considered a potential career shift into the outdoor-travel industry. I’d trekked in India and Pakistan and climbed mountains in Nepal. But Lenin Peak was to be my biggest summit yet.
Narrowly surviving the avalanche didn’t stop me from climbing mountains. Indeed, I spent the next five years helping to guide expeditions all over the world before switching careers again, into journalism. Although the memories never left me, the recurring nightmares eventually stopped. But that tragic day—the luckiest of my life—was vividly etched into my psyche.
The thought that I had made Vlada’s life worse for my own selfish ends made me feel sick, and challenged my views – and lifelong ambition – of pet ownership. I couldn’t have put it this way then, but I felt myself caught in an unexpected ethical dilemma: the more I’d come to care for an individual animal, the more I’d started to question the morality of “owning” them altogether.
Is giving an artist a one-star review an act of abuse – casting the first stone? Is it worse when the reviewer is male and the artist female? That’s the starting point of this entertaining and very timely debut novel from Charlotte Runcie, an arts journalist who, as a young intern, was lambasted on stage by a successful standup to whom she’d given a bad review.
With its expressions of profound loneliness and deep longing for human connection, “Lucky Tomorrow” offers lessons on observing pain and cherishing hope, while also illuminating the lives of the unnoticed and unseen, arraying itself among other masterpieces such as Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women.”