Georgia Hunter

Georgia Hunter is an American author whose debut novel We Were the Lucky Ones draws on her own family history to tell a sweeping, deeply researched story of a Jewish family surviving the Holocaust.

Georgia Hunter discovered in her twenties that her family had survived the Holocaust against extraordinary odds, and spent a decade researching the experience of five siblings scattered across Europe and beyond during the Second World War. We Were the Lucky Ones, published in 2017, is the result — a novel built on meticulous historical research that follows each member of the Kurc family through the devastation of the war years, from Siberian labour camps to the Italian coast to refugee camps in Brazil.

The novel’s greatest strength is its scope and its fidelity to actual events. Hunter resists the temptation to simplify or dramatise beyond what the documented record provides, and the result is a story that carries the weight of truth even in its novelistic moments. The five-sibling structure allows her to show the war from multiple geographies and experiences simultaneously, and the periodic reunions that punctuate the narrative provide genuine emotional relief after sustained chapters of separation and danger.

We Were the Lucky Ones has been praised for its emotional power and criticised in the same breath for a prose style that is occasionally functional rather than elegant — Hunter is a thorough researcher and a clear writer, but she does not always rise to the literary level her story warrants. Some readers also find the multiple-perspective structure initially challenging to follow. These are relatively minor reservations about a debut novel of genuine moral seriousness, and the family history at its centre gives the book an emotional authenticity that more conventionally literary Holocaust fiction sometimes lacks.