The Ruiners is 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.
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About The Ruiners
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.
The Ruiners is an eco-thriller-meets-love-triangle that makes for a fast-paced, satisfying read. The novel engages with a variety of current political hot topics such as environmental terrorism, gender roles, activism, global capitalism, and climate change. Blueberries, the author’s debut essay collection, was critically acclaimed and popular in the UK and Australia.
Praise for The Ruiners
“The Ruiners is furiously funny, like hanging out at a house party with a well-read and occasionally cruel bestie. Open the novel at random: the jokes keep coming.”—Declan Fry, The Sydney Morning Herald
The Ruiners is “Craftier and more subversive than it appears. This anti-inheritance novel is in direct, playful conversation with one of its inspirations—Great Expectations by Charles Dickens—and, while knowledge of the coming-of-age novel isn’t essential, it’s delightful to see Savage tease the themes of the original in her surreal contemporary take . . .
For anyone willing to see the humour in the ridiculous, flawed ways we try to connect with each other in the ruins of the world, there are a lot of laughs to be had . . . Savage is a sharp, incisive writer with a lot to say about the world. But it’s what she says about people and life that really hits home here. It’s all ridiculous, she seems to be saying, it’s all wonderful.”—Bec Kavanagh, The Guardian
“Savage’s eco-thriller [The Ruiners] starts off full throttle, and reminds me of how important fiction about our world is vital.”—Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful
The Ruiners is “A sharp-witted novel of disillusioned millennials in a crumbling world . . . Fans of Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood ought to take note.”—Publishers Weekly
“With rare wit and a scathing critique of millennial malaise, The Ruiners tesselates perspectives from a generation of disaffected Australians striving in vain for greatness abroad. Ellena Savage is a maestro of alienation on the page, and her tenacity to distill high-theory into the daily negotiation of labor and love is remarkable to behold.”—Bobuq Sayed, author of No God But Us
“What an exhilarating debut novel. In this gorgeous tale of rot—that of empire, of capitalism, of ecological collapse—Ellena Savage writes with galvanizing 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 [The Ruiners] 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 Judgment
About Ellena Savage, Author of The Ruiners
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. She currently resides in Australia.
You can connect with Ellena Savage on her website, and on LinkedIn.
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Catapult/Counterpoint/Soft Skull
ISBN Hardcover 9781646223503
Pub Date Dec 1, 2026
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