Paradise Estate

by Max Easton

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.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

304 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2023

About the author

Max Easton is the author of the novels The Magpie Wing (2021) and its loose sequel Paradise Estate (2023), with the third in the series, Now Autonomy, to be published by Giramondo in 2026. He runs Barely Human, a zine and tape label exploring underground music's ties to subculture and counterculture, and has played in several Sydney punk bands including BB & the Blips, Romance and The Baby. His fiction and cultural criticism has also appeared in Sydney Review of Books, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin and Heat.

Reviews

[Jared Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

i really want everyone to read this - especially if you live in sydney, have sharehoused in a shitty rental or ever had idealistic friends who refuse to sell out

I love max easton’s books. they are so funny, so sad, so precise: such beautiful distillations of trying to live morally/with some sort of left-wing ethics in sydney, a city that seems determined to crush any counter culture.

i love these characters, even the ones i hate. they’re all so REAL, with such depth and agony.

he understands so much about australian political apathy, presents our barren culture in new ways, makes me interested in rugby league, doesn’t treat working class australians as props

love love love love love

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Forgive the terrible photo of one of the best Australian novels I’ve read in ages. Imagine being this perceptive a writer. Imagine conjuring these characters who all feel so real and alive on the page. Imagine capturing a suburb you never have to have stepped foot in to completely understand. Imagine achieving what so many novels are attempting – a piercing look at contemporary millennial inner city living. The ennui made me ache. Easton makes it look so easy. I’m in awe. Do not sleep on this book.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Paradise Estate by Max Easton as the kind of sequel that doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but does tighten what already worked in Magpie Wing. It kept the things I loved and improved the parts I didn't.

What I loved most is what Easton does best: deeply human, flawed characters. Not the polished, charming kind either—often not especially likeable on the surface—but written with enough depth and inner logic that I found myself invested anyway. The relationships feel lived-in, the motivations feel messy in the way real people are messy, and the emotional beats land because the characters have been properly earned rather than engineered.

Easton also nails something that’s hard to do without sounding preachy: a clear, realistic vision of Sydney for millennials, especially the way housing shapes the contours of a life. There’s a groundedness to it—how people talk, what they tolerate, what they compromise on, what they quietly resent—that made the city feel less like a backdrop and more like a pressure system. I also appreciated how he worked Australian events into the story in a way that felt organic, not like a checklist of local references.

If I’m taking a star off anywhere, it’s for the same issue that showed up in Magpie Wing: Easton can linger too long in niche subject matter. The communism/activism threads, the Sydney punk scene, and the rugby league material are clearly part of the book’s DNA, and when you’re already fluent in those worlds they probably add richness. But at times it becomes a little alienating, like the novel is speaking in a dialect you’re expected to understand. It’s not that it’s badly written—more that the depth of detail can slow momentum and narrow the doorway for readers who don’t have that context.

In terms of comparison, this felt like Magpie Wing, but better—more confident, more controlled, and more rewarding in the character work. And while there are plenty of strong threads running through the book, Rocco and Beth were the standouts for me—characters with enough contradiction and specificity to feel real, and the kind you keep thinking about after you’ve put the book down.

Overall: 4 stars. A smart, deeply felt Sydney novel with characters that worm their way under your skin. Just be prepared for a few stretches where the book dives so deep into its niche worlds that you may feel like you’ve missed a memo.

[Adrian K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant, devastating portrait of Australian millennial malaise, as the world seems doomed to some years of social, political, and economic decline. Just as good as The Magpie Wing. I appreciate also that Easton has brought terminally-online phrases like "posting cringe" and "touch grass" into the canon of serious literature.

[Lia Perkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly this book was almost too weirdly curated for me. I really enjoyed Magpie Wing, the book this is a sort of sequel to, and Paradise Estate only got closer to my life. Set within the exact area of Dulwich Hill/Hurlstone Park I lived in 2020/1, I could picture the house instantly. The cultural commentary on Sunday is mostly fiercely relevant, from music scenes, socialist politics and protests to dead end jobs. I thought most of the characters served their purposes well, while a few scenes missed the spot. The style is probably not for everyone, and at times it felt like a book trying to place itself away from book culture.

[Adakhc · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fresh story on living in a sharehouse in Sydney in your late 30s. Set in 2022. Highly relatable especially the punishing lefty men.

[Jarad Travers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good follow up to Magpie Wing. Very Sydney. Very inner-west.

Someone turn this into a TV show!

[Valerie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finished on a Monday night. Confession, I read pretty much all of this while recovering from many hangovers, so I read this kind of loosely, with no real propulsion or great attention. It was a neat hang-out fiction, though a little scrappy (I spotted quite a few grammatical errors, and there were a lot of this type of phrase -- "X", said Y, as they [detailed action] which for some reason rubs me the wrong way and doesn't sound writerly.) But otherwise, the characters felt very knowable, and the bizarro Sydney milieu explored here is fascinating and subtly, convincingly tragic.

[An]

sheesh… yawn… snore… snooze… like the dog that sees it’s reflection in the mirror and isn’t shocked, despite the fleas and the abrasions and the degradation. well, atleast the soil is a better home than on a bookshelf at vinnies with everything else that’s been forgotten

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book to read if you don’t want to escape at all.

[Chloe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Such a Sydney book!

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked it up because I remembered really enjoying the writing style of the first book (and the cover art too...love collages). I was sad that Walt died, and yet it also felt like a satisfying conclusion to the prior events. Overall, it felt much more cohesive, probably due to the consistent setting and cast of characters.

[Bikerpaul68 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Immediately after reading "The Magpie Wing", I read this book, which is its sequel. However it can be read on its own, and it might be better to do just that, since it is a much better novel. It concerns a group of very different people who find themselves obliged for financial reasons to share a decrepit rented house in Western Sydney. Each copes with the stresses of communal life in his or her own way, but broadly speaking there are those who see it as a political act and those who see it as a dire necessity. Much of the plot derives from the tension between these two poles, and I found it far more absorbing than the rather ramshackle meanderings of the previous book.
My main criticism is that one of the characters is, for no obvious reason, referred to throughout as "they" or "them" or even "themself" [sic]. This reduces quite a few passages to ambiguous nonsense and is very irritating.

[Anton Grodeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to get into this book, it was hovering around 1-2 starts for the first third of the book mainly because I didn't really 'get it.' This is a book about Millenials in Sydney, and i am right at the other end of the age spectrum so couldn't relate. Once I realised how it was unfolding, and got to know the motivation of the various characters in the book, it started to make more sense and I became fully invested (well almost). The writing style took a bit of getting used to, I was not familiar with this author beforehand and picked ths book after seeing it reviewed

[Meg Vierboom · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was a slow burn for me, but picked up around the chapter on how to rent a commune, and again when Nathan and Alice move home to Woollahra. I love the way Max weaves together the banal and the absurd, at once reminding us of the frustrations and possibilities at our own doorstep. I’ll never walk past the Gladstone without glancing up towards the balcony, and want to one day catch the sunset at Market City’s hidden rooftop. This book is great company for your cynicism and hope.

[Josie Seto · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong follow up - the exhaustion of Sydney living, shareholding and activism

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Things haven’t moved on much since the 70s, if this is supposed to be a contemporary slice of Sydney.

[Brenda Rosser]

v. fine, all the share house/bolshie shite

[Annieke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dnf

[Jen]

DNF audiobook at half way mark. Some interesting characters and setting but nothing much happening.

[Gavan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great instalment in the life of some characters from the excellent "The Magpie Wing". I love the short, sharp structure. And the development of the characters and great dialogue. Very realistic depiction of share housing (although its been a while since I lived in one). My only criticism is that I think it would help to read the two books closer together than I did - there were times where it felt that characters were following on from something in the first book that I had forgotten about. But nice for Helen to get a book to herself given that the first seemed to focus on Walt.

[Steve Frederick · Rating 3 out of 5]

With a cameo from my own Summer Hill IGA, this was an Inner West share-house tale about moving on, or utterly failing to, or perhaps just continuing on (even if without fully moving on)… the publisher describes the story as framing the “optimism of the will” with the pessimism of the times. Not sure the “optimism of the will” really shone through…
Monkey Grip (Garner) had the benefit of following one central character’s share-house experience, providing a more reflective character development that “Paradise Estate” didn’t share. But would ABSOLUTELY love to hear Easton and Garner in conversation about the experience and character of their respective generations!!

[Andre King · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read August 2025.