The Ruiners

By: Ellena Savage

'With a scathing wit and genuine narrative flair, Ellena Savage has written a contemporary parable about gentrification, class, climate change and the need for political action'
- Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection

'A darkly comic, ridiculously smart novel about desire, desperation, hope, disappointment, politics and trying to do the right thing'
- Madeleine Gray, author of Green Dot

'A riot - a book full of wild energy and uncompromising wit, with a huge heart'
- Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace

'Thrilling . . . I stayed up late reading'
- Lauren Oyler, author of No Judgement

Pip's life is going nowhere. She's a university drop-out stuck in a dead-end job at a Melbourne lobster shack. But when her long-absent father dies, she's left an orphan and fifty-thousand dollars richer. She doesn't know what to do with her windfall until she meets Sasha, a dashing young scholar of Balkan literature.

Together, they hatch a mad plan: buy a decrepit house on a distressed Greek island where Sasha will write and Pip will sort out what to do with her life. However, instead of bohemian idyll, the couple find themselves ensnared in an environmental struggle that brings the mistakes of the past into sharp relief.

This is a literary page-turner about love, lust, legacy and the last days of civilisation as we know it. Instead of hiding from the world we've inherited, The Ruiners asks how we can create a better one.

'Ellena Savage is savagely smart and talented'
- Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room©2026 Ellena Savage (P)2026 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critic reviews

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 very well (Lauren Oyler, author of No Judgement)

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 riot - a book full of wild energy and uncompromising wit, with a huge heart. Like all my favourite writers, Savage lets no one off the hook but has compassion for everyone. I loved it (Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace)

Ellena Savage's brain is a treasure. The Ruiners is a darkly comic, ridiculously smart novel about desire, desperation, hope, disappointment, politics and trying to do the right thing. Instead of luxuriating in the glamour of political and emotional ambivalence, Savage thinks deeply and truly about environmental collapse, the ethics of ownership and what it is to 'belong' to a country, and to other people. It's barbed, serious, but also seriously fun. It's Charles Dickens' Great Expectations meets Katie Kitamura's Audition, but set on a decrepit Greek island and with lobsters. I loved it