The Ruiners: The sharp and sexy novel about an unexpected inheritance and ruined expectations for fans of Perfection

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.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Thriller

Kindle Edition

Expected publication December 1, 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.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We inherit the world already burning and call it adulthood.”

The Ruiners feels like stepping into a dreamy coastal escape only to realise everyone there is quietly unraveling under the weight of grief, desire, and the looming collapse of the world around them.

Pip is messy, drifting, grieving, and deeply unsure of what her life is meant to become after the death of her estranged father leaves her with an inheritance and even more questions. Enter Sasha, charming, intellectual, slightly pretentious in the way all literary men named Sasha probably should be. Together they flee Melbourne for the fantasy of reinvention on a crumbling Greek island, only to discover that paradise comes with mould, environmental collapse, inherited guilt, and the creeping feeling that maybe you can’t outrun yourself after all.

As a huge fan of the authors essay collection, Blueberries, I went into The Ruiners with ridiculously high expectations and somehow Elena Savage still exceeded them. The prose is sharp, restless, intimate, and quietly devastating in places. One minute you’re reading about desire and dead end jobs, the next you’re spiralling into reflections on capitalism, climate grief, family inheritance, and the strange performance of becoming the kind of person you thought adulthood would make you.

What I loved most was how alive this book feels. Sweaty, salty, intelligent, slightly feral. It captures that terrifying period of your twenties where every decision feels both meaningless and life defining at the same time.

A literary page turner for people who like their fiction emotionally complicated, politically sharp, and just a little bit unhinged.

I Highly Recommend.

Thank you Simon & Schuster for my advanced readers copy.

Available Now!

[Caitlyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

Felt like I was trapped at a melbourne uni houseparty with the most pretentious people to walk the earth.

[Annette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't work for me at all. What was point of this book? Disjointed character storylines which made no sense..all in their own disturbed and broken, trying to spice it up with sex scenes and in the end we throw in some climate change issues. And maybe I am old fashioned but I still think quotation marks are important to use for dialogues.

[Linda Quatermass · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finished this confused attempt at fiction with topics ranging from climate change to grief via erotic love and lust with a trip to Greece thrown in as an aside. The back panel describes it as “what do we inherit from the world and the people in it ?” Really? Is that what this was about? Yes I finished it because I’m stubborn. So one of these stars is for me. For effort. Save yourself.

[Renée Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pip and the waste management corruption plot both deserved more pages.

[liv (≧▽≦) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was so fun and perfectly encapsulates the chaos of being in your 20s. Euro-summer vibes paired with impulse, love, loneliness and being utterly lost in adulthood.

The book follows multiple perspectives, our main character Pip is completely lost as a waitress in Melbourne, before randomly inheriting some money from her absentee father. Around the same time, she meets Sasha, and we get a whirlwind 'romance' between the two. They marry and buy a decaying house on a small island in Greece, pack up their things and go. We also meet Pip and Sasha's friend Viv, who comes to stay with them for awhile who is equally as lost in his job as a journalist. All the characters are soooo in their head about everything, it makes the reading experience both ridiculous, frustrating and humanising all at once.

As one expects with impulse decisions, everything goes south, and the characters are left trying to put themselves back together both financially and emotionally. The backdrop of this book is so dreamy - similar vibes to Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, and the lobster crossover was a funny and great way to tie the start and end of the book together!

[Kylie Butler · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not much to recommend this. The characters were unlikeable, the story chaotic (not in a good way).

[Nate Wenke · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to enjoy this more.

I can appreciate the author comes from an essayist background, however this piece is so blatantly smacked with cultural and political theory that it becomes pretentious and difficult to muddle through.

That being said, I myself may not be the target audience for this book. Someone with greater patience than I may enjoy more.

Lobsters 🦞

[Tessa Vale · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mhhhh like what? I wanted to love this book - the premise sounded exciting but I had no idea what was happening from one page to the next or how these people keep appearing and adding to the storyline.

The last few chapters end up being about sick lobsters and a lady trying to keep them alive. I don’t know if this was meant to represent something bigger about life or the Greek Island they are on but I just didn’t get it.

Pip and Sasha are both awful characters, too. Haha

[Rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretentious and chaotic. And why do pretentious novels never use quotation marks?

[Libby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Part 1: insufferable woman makes impulsive unwise decisions due to being duped through sex with an awful man
Part 2: most enjoyable section minus the guy thinking his flu symptoms were psychosomatic (what’s with leftists in books I’ve read recently thinking all illness is psychosomatic?). Union meeting was highly realistic. Found the idea of someone being cancelled for cancelling cancellation kinda funny. Good points about children, prisoners, mentally ill not having sufferage.
Part 3: aforementioned terrible characters having sex with each other for way too many pages
Coda: anticlimactic. you find out this entire thing has been a waste of time

I need to stop reading books/listening to podcasts by/featuring Marxists. If only my book club would stop assigning them. It’s funny how all these books complain about the left eating itself when I feel like that’s exactly what they are doing in/through these books.

Disappointed because the cover is one of my favourites in recent years.

PS bring back quotation marks, especially when it’s not clear what thoughts are in people’s heads and what thoughts they are saying aloud.

[Julia André · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was interesting. In some parts it was really good but in the final third I was like ffs I can’t stand when a character becomes really philosophical and in their head. But I really liked the rubbish aspect and the insufferable socialist anarchist aspect. And the ending was very good. Connected to marina when she said laying in the sun made her feel like life was reverberating through her.

[Michelia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Mon · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5⭐ The characters are so pretentious.
The final chapter lifted my rating by half a star.

[Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poised with promise, the opening third of this book was told through the peerless perspective of Pip. I was settling in for something special when we veered across to Viv and then Sasha's stories... and what a pointless, pretentious detritus of drivel that was. Total tosspot energy.

[Callan S · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s a no from me. It began well, but fell into a deep malaise from part two and never truly recovered. I don’t think I could be friends with any of these people.

[Annie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this, a very readable novel that made me chuckle and made me think. Very relatable for millennials who want to do everything and save everyone, and who maybe should just settle for saving themselves.

[Gavan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard work. Written from 3 perspectives (Pip, Vivek & Sasha) plus a concluding coda - I managed to work my way through Sasha, skimmed Vivek and & had largely given up by Sasha. The writing is very dense & forced. "My mother had loved me without my having to alter myself, and this experience had spoiled me for conditional love, the proletarian labour of adult romantic entanglements." I guess it is well written because Pip is clearly a very unlikeable character - self-absorbed, clueless, annoying, obtuse. I usually like books where the narrator rambles; but this one felt disjointed rather than rambling ...

[Debra]

This book peaked at the cover design and plummeted from there. Critically lauded when first released, it did not live up to the hype. It was as pretentious as its characters and the plot was boring. I have tried to sell my copy but I can’t even give it away for free.

[Kate · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

I'll admit that I pounced on The Ruiners by Ellena Savage because I wanted a bit of a sticky-beak.

Sticky-beak because when I read a novel by Savage's partner - I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena - I was thrilled (in an unabashed gossipy way) by the Melbourne-literary-scene setting that focused on a handful of characters, including a rather unflattering presentation of the narrator's partner, a ‘…Melbourne-famous’ essayist (how much did Amerena draw on his relationship with Savage, a known essayist?!). So, I was desperate to see whether Savage returned the auto-fiction favour... and if she did (in the character of Sasha), what a burn!

The story focuses on Pip, a woman whose life has stalled. She's in a dead-end job, is broke and has no plan to return to her university studies. When her long-absent father dies, she inherits fifty-thousand dollars and soon after, meets Sasha, a star in the narrow, academic world of postwar Yugoslavian literature.

Sasha is a walking red flag. He is also the kind of self-important person who I would avoid at a party. But Pip doesn't see flaws, she sees vulnerabilities -

It was then that I understood who Sasha was: he was someone who presented himself at the radical fringes of the institution he nonetheless depended on for his identity and self-esteem.

They begin a passionate and intense relationship and within months have married and hatched a mad plan - use Pip's inheritance to buy a decrepit house on a Greek island, where Sasha will write and Pip will sort out what to do with her life.

Not the life I had once imagined in a grand metropolis where I might self-actualise; not Milan, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles. Instead, I envisioned a simple life, a village life in which I could tend the garden, read in the shade, work the lunch shift at a little local tavern. Then, as the sun retreated each evening, I would rest my hand on my hip, look out at the horizon, smell the wild thyme, listen to the cacophony of insects, and watch the sky turn mauve, fuchsia and crimson on the horizon.

However, the house is not what they expected -

Veins of black lined the amber exterior. The building looked wet, rotten, amphibious.

Pip struggles to make the house habitable. Sasha is preoccupied with his writing. Pip's closest friend, Viv, an environmental journalist, who is having his own career and relationship crisis, arrives for a visit. He spots a potential story relating to the island's waste disposal, and this dominates the last part of the novel.

There's a climate-crisis message in the book (the title refers to humans, the 'ruiners') as well as strong themes around political activism and cultural property. It's a lot, particularly when you throw in nods to Dickens's Great Expectations and mentions of Derrida and Hegel...

Perhaps we were not after all mere products of post-modern tea-towel circulation; I could still be moved by the world. 

Maybe I'm particularly shallow but I don't have thoughts like this crossing my mind too often (and this is one example of many similar lines in the book).

Did Savage attempt too much? I can't answer that but personally, I didn't feel invested in any of the plot threads and by the end, every mention of Sasha made me roll my eyes. Hard.

Which brings me back to Amerena's novel - when I finished it, I assumed it was satire, because there was so much overblown, academic grand-standing. I initially thought the same about The Ruiners, especially all the bits about Sasha, because he is a truly ridiculous, entitled man. However, the philosophizing in this novel seems much more serious and heavy-handed. So I began to wonder, is this how Ellena and Dominic are with their friends? Is this their experience of life? Is neither novel satire?

Side-note - I was fascinated by the role of mothers in this book (three were mentioned, each quite different).

My mother had loved me without me having to alter myself, and this experience had spoiled me for conditional love, the proleterian labour of adult romantic entanglements. Yet in Sasha I recognised this same quality: he could love without inflicting expectations on his beloved. He didn't intercede, reprimand or judge.

This quote was early in the book because Sasha reveals himself to be none of those things. If I had any more energy for these characters, I'd delve into the mother theme, but I think I'm done here.

2.5/5

[Libby · Rating 3 out of 5]

What Great Expectations could have been if Dickens was a card carrying Socialist and was interested more in the ruins rather than keeping up appearances (Pip and Magwitch included). This wasn't an easy read. Sadly I understood the sections on academia, having been one of those able to narrow my focus and acquire three degrees. I also took First year Philosophy as well as Sociology before discovering the sheer tedium of these subjects as discussed by pimply, extreme virgins in Doc Martens. So I am well acquainted with the pretentiousness of characters like Sascha but understanding them doesn't make them any more likeable.

In fact, there was not a single character that I liked in this book. However, I could still appreciate the dry humour. All three main narrators are deeply flawed, selfish, somewhat self aware people dealing with a dying world...aren't we all just?

I was frustrated by the ending where Marina came more into focus. I would have preferred a tidier ending with Pip and Sascha and not Marina whom I cared about even less than the others. The last paragraph written from the perspective of the Lobsters was also bizzaro. I'm guessing the last words were a reference to a battle cry - “Eleftheria i Thanatos”…… “Freedom or Death” by Greeks against the Ottoman Empire in the early 1800's. Or a Spartan warcry? But Lobsters? I dunno, a Surrealist Dali reference maybe? Anyway it was weird. On the back cover was a recommendation referencing it as "the Great Millennial novel". As a GenXer I guess that explains why I don't fully understand it. I do get the raging against the dying of the light though, that we still believe in love and art and goodness in the world - despite all the horror - and that is worth fighting for.

[Olivia Hurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s an interesting experience to be someone who has completed a Bachelor of Arts at Melbourne Uni reading a book by someone who has evidently done a Bachelor of Arts at Melbourne Uni about people who have done a Bachelor of Arts at Melbourne Uni. Some of the references in this book to Fanon and socialist theory transported me right back to Arts West. But to be honest I could done without some of the lengthy passages about the perils of academia, or the description of an essay about how the TV show Girls is a representation of Western society’s denial of imperial violence. Or at least these parts could have been a bit shorter. It was quite hard to tell whether Savage was critiquing this kind of worldview or using it as a serious lens - I definitely enjoyed passages more when they seemed like the former. But sometimes, when I was feeling less generous, they felt like a bit of a self-indulgent attempt to bulk up a novel by recycling essays from undergrad sociology units.

Still - other sections of the book were interesting and enjoyable. The characters were mostly unlikeable on their own, but their complicated entanglements were enjoyable to follow. I also found the environmental degradation storyline intriguing, and wish we had delved into that a little bit more. I actually think the structure of the book made the whole thing feel a bit piece-y, and like many of the storyline’s and character arcs could have been rounded out more. But I’d still say it had enough compelling energy and oddity to it to keep me interested. So 3 stars.

[Alison · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book tries to integrate academic cultural theory into fiction but it’s not so enjoyable because: it’s so didactic? So obvious, simply inserted into interior monologue? Or because it’s attached to unlikeable characters under the illusion that it can account for their awful lives and lies? There were plenty of heavy handed literary allusions. Pip’s was the most okay narrative, but she falls in love, gets an inheritance and spends it all on a scam house on a Greek island for her lover! WTF. And his narrative was pretty vile. There is so much explanatory history that feels like too much saying not doing. I read the author’s first book of essays which were smart and widely read and performative but this is dire. Not a fan anymore.

[Rebecca Larsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow.

Parts of this book were really great - the parts about relationships and how they can go wrong, be misinterpreted, be tricky. That was really engaging.

But in places things seem to just go off on a tangent. Ramblings about all kinds of social justice issues, and climate problems. Socialism. All the things. And, although at a stretch I could see how these interludes were reflected somehow in the rest of the narrative, they really put me off reading the book. It feels like there is a divide and a confusion around what the author wanted the book to be, and it just didn't work well in my opinion.

The other parts were really good, though. Hence the 3 stars.

[Becc · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't get quite the way through this in time for the book club night devoted to it, and thought 'What a relief, I can abandon it,' but it kept coming on Audible in the car and I was so close to the end I decided to finish it and get my "Books Read in '26" number up on GoodReads at least.

Might've given it a 2.5 if it were possible to give half stars. Or might not have too. I get you don't have to like every character (or even any character) in a book to still enjoy it overall; but goodness there were some challenging ones in this book, and they got way more air space than was needed or wanted I think. I laughed a couple of times; but overall a 'no' from me.

[Annelise Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

The start showed promise but lost its way quite quickly. A lot of it felt like a wankfest for the author to dump their sociopolitical knowledge, which was ironic given the characters and plot, and wasted too many pages on this when it didn’t really add anything valuable to the plot or characters imo. The writing felt a bit pretentious at times and word choice was often repetitive which got old pretty quick. The whole thing felt disjointed and heavy handed, especially the lobster motif (felt like an English teacher at told their student they must include one so did without having the tact to actually weave it in with purpose. Idk I wouldn’t recommend, did not love

[Kaitlan Sharpe · Rating 2 out of 5]

A big thank you to the publisher for sending me an ARC of this book

I am so sad to say I really did not like this book.
I came into it so excited and was very disappointed with how it read. I honestly can't even tell you what the plot or the ending was.

The characters were super unlikable and their storylines didn't make sense to me. The dialogue felt off and confused. Absolutely unhinged and chaotic and I normally love that, but this time I did not at all.

Maybe I couldn't relate because it is very literary but it was slog.

[Katja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really fascinating literary read, there are a few times where the book gets more intellectual but I thought the characters were well written and the nods to the landfill crisis very topical. I was lucky enough to hear Ellena Savage speak at a book event which def gave me a deeper appreciation for the story and important insight - how else would I know that the lobsters are in fact speaking and not just a part of Sasha's fever dream hehe

[Marisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

solid 3.5
The neurosis of every character, and specifically viv, was written really well. Sasha’s arc was soo interesting and at times dense, but perhaps intentional due to his complete self involvement. there was a lot to like, I felt the prose snappy and the plot bonkers, the characters bizarre and their interactions believable. it’s a strange book that I did quite appreciate

[Nikita T Khan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Truly this was my experience - turning the page, reading and asking WHY.
But all the characters are nuanced, they all are...HUMAN. Pip with hinging her hopes on a man and an island, Sasha considering love as a project and Viv just trying to project what he thinks people will think is a ambitious and good person.