The lucky ones - Julianne Pachico

The Lucky Ones is Julianne Pachico's haunting debut collection of stories. Set in lush, heady Colombia - and also in a jungle-like New York City - it brings together the fates of guerrilla soldiers, rich kids, rabbits, hostages, bourgeois expats, and drug dealers. Exploring what makes a victim and what makes a perpetrator, these stories show lives fatefully entwined, despite deep cultural divides.

Julianne Pachico was born in 1985 in Cambridge, England. She grew up in Cali, Colombia, and has lived and worked abroad in various places, including Ecuador, Mexico and Indonesia. She is currently completing her PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at UEA. In 2015 she was longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and had two stories anthologized in Salt Publishing's Best British Short Stories 2015. Her short stories have been published by The White Review, Lighthouse and Litro.

A riveting collection.
James Scudamore

An expansive tapestry of a debut.
Elle

Innovative and arresting . . . Each story in this dazzling collection is filled with snarling prose and bravura narrative moves: astonishing jump cuts, thrilling imaginative flights, sudden stabs of surrealism.
Sunday Times

Blunt, fresh and unsentimental . . . An enjoyable and freaky joy ride . . . Go to Pachicho's Columbia.
New York Times Book Review

Astounding . . .
just breathtaking: bizarre, beautiful, and brutal. And funny! Funny in a dark and lovely way. And completely compelling. I could not put it down.
The Pool

'Girls, guns, ghosts and cocaine-addicted rabbits. Absolutely brilliant.'
Mark Haddon

'Thrilling.Julianne Pachico's remarkably inventive debut navigates what it means to grow up wealthy amid the reality of conflict in Colombia.'
Atlantic

'Julianne Pachico's debut is remarkable. Every story in The Lucky Ones achieves something different, growing into a book that is way more than the sum of its parts. It is terrifying and funny, moving and surreal. This collection of short stories is my favourite novel of the year.'
Andy Miller

'Julianne Pachico takes a hammer and brings it down on the superficial gloss of history, piecing the fragments into a kaleidoscopic collage that tells a deeply observed, stylistically adventurous and emotionally riveting story of people caught up in the violence of Colombia's guerrilla insurgencies. Moving effortlessly between the surreal and the real, sometimes in the space of a single sentence, Pachico delivers one of the most original and mesmerizing debuts in years.'
Marisa Silver

'The volatile, concentrated world of Julianne Pachico's stories immediately surrounds the reader. We are compelled to follow her deep into the fears, fantasies and denials of her characters, whose susceptibilities we must recognise as our own.'
Lavinia Greenlaw

'In finely calibrated prose [The Lucky Ones] plumbs the fates of those who struggled against the Colombian political upheaval that began in the 90s.'
O Magazine

'Relentlessly rewarding.with traces of Gabriel Garcia Mrquez's News of a Kidnapping. Immersive.Brings life to a South American struggle often forgotten in global headlines'
Booklist

'Riveting.Having lived in Colombia until she turned eighteen, Pachico has a firsthand connection to the country's charms and troubles that shines through on every gripping page.'
Publishers Weekly