The Ruiners:A Novel

A sexy, cerebral eco-thriller following a young couple who purchase a decrepit house on an environmentally ravaged Greek island, to disastrous personal and political consequences

Pip’s life is going nowhere. A twenty-nine-year-old waitress with a dead-end job at a lobster restaurant in Melbourne, she discovers her long-absent father has died, leaving her both an orphan and fifty -thousand dollars richer. Pip’s new boyfriend, Sasha, a dashing young scholar of Balkan fiction, convinces her to spend the money on a house in Greece. Swept up in their romance, Pip buys a crumbling fixer-upper on the one economically distressed island she can afford. But instead of landing on a bohemian island idyll, the couple and their friends find themselves enmeshed in an environmental struggle that brings the mistakes of the past—and new betrayals—into sharp relief.

A sharp, funny, and deeply felt consideration of global capitalism and its misdoings, The Ruiners announces the arrival of an exciting new talent in literary fiction. | "What an exhilarating debut novel. In this gorgeous tale of rot—that of empire, of capitalism, of ecological collapse—Ellena Savage writes with galvanising wit and great style while excoriating both global delusions and personal vanities. Most brilliantly, she does all this with a tender heart—what, after all, can a person do at the end of the world but build his or her little scaffoldings of survival, denial, self-justification? Here’s a book to make you want to burn it all down—but perhaps while cradling a sick crustacean in your arms." —Hermione Hoby, author of Virtue

"I read The Ruiners with an ever more intense combination of excitement, compassion and Schadenfreude. Ellena Savage has written a contemporary parable about gentrification, class, climate change and the need for political action in a society that seems to leave it less and less agency." —Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection

"The Ruiners is a thrilling, stylish novel. I stayed up late reading, immediately drawn to Savage's three narrators and their messy, idealistic relationships. But it was the book's sneakily profound political critique, which is of course inseparable from those characters and their relationships, that impressed me most. Is there any hope for us? is not a question we can answer, and this book does it brilliantly." —Lauren Oyler, author of No Judgement
| ELLENA SAVAGE is an Australian author. Her debut essay collection, Blueberries, was shortlisted for the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and longlisted for the Stella Prize. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, HEAT, Sydney Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Guardian, and elsewhere.