Paradise Estate

Receive a discount when you buy Paradise Estate together with Max Easton’s 2021 novel, The Magpie Wing. Find out more.

The new novel from the author of The Magpie Wing, longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

It’s 2022 and Helen is starting again. Newly single, dogged by grief, adrift in a hostile rental market, she finds a four-bedroom house flanked by apartment blocks that stare into the yard. Despite the lack of privacy, she fills its rooms with an unlikely group of residents looking for communal belonging: zine maker, activist, disaffected artist, part-time rugby league player – each looking to build a future, each haunted by their recent past. But if a rented house in Sydney could ever promise salvation, it would come with a coating of black mould.

Set across the course of a year, against the backdrop of pandemic and war, of climate and housing crises, Paradise Estate documents the struggle against generational confusion and social malaise. When isolation and atomisation are all we’ve been given, what can be built from common ground?

Written with ironic wit and an eye for contemporary events, the follow-up to Max Easton’s acclaimed debut, The Magpie Wing, sets the pessimism of its times against the optimism of the will.

Max Easton is once again uncomfortably perceptive. Paradise Estate acerbically captures the frustrated idealism of leftist sharehouse living, questioning the efficacy of radical politics and art even as it stokes the fires of rebellion. It’s Monkey Grip for the Mark Fisher generation.
Madeleine Gray

Praise for The Magpie Wing:

An original, exceptional novel.
The Guardian

An anxious novel about anxious characters in anxious times. It seeks to register this anxiety in all of its contradictions and complexities, but thankfully does not want to resolve it.
Sydney Review of Books

A moving portrait of a city and region undergoing enormous change, told through the perspectives of three unique, sympathetic and vulnerable characters.
Books+Publishing