The Ruiners

by Ellena Savage

Pip's life is going nowhere. A twenty-nine-year-old server stuck in a dead-end job at a lobster shack 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 on a Greek island where he might write his research project in peace. A lover of love, Pip complies, and buys a decrepit doer-upper on the one economically distressed, environmentally ravaged island she can afford.

But instead of landing on a bohemian island idyll, the couple and their friend Viv -- who is himself seeking refuge from the disaster that his job at a poorly funded left-wing news site has become -- find themselves enmeshed in an environmental struggle with and against members of the local community that brings the mistakes of the past into sharp relief.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication November 5, 2026

About the author

Ellena Savage is an Australian author and academic. She is the author of the chapbook Yellow City (The Atlas Review, 2019) and numerous essays, stories, and poems published in literary journals internationally. Ellena is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including most recently the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship 2019–2021. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, Dominic Amerena.