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

“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