If money cannot buy happiness, what drives people to participate in a lottery? And what effect does (almost) winning have on someone’s life, or that of the people around them? Cécile Hupin and Katherine Longly set out to compare dreams with reality by giving a voice to those who won or came close to winning a jackpot, for better or for worse. Their stories form a reflection of our society, our aspirations, our beliefs, and our fraught relationship with money. All of the personal accounts that Hupin and Longly document in ‘Just My Luck’ are invariably and inextricably linked to notions of luck (and bad luck) – as if believing in one risks activating the other.