"It’s exhilarating to read something so close to the present and with such specific textures of place… Easton understands the uneasy relief that sets in at rock bottom, deals with human fragility in a steady, understated way – and always punches up. He is unforgiving of his characters’ small hypocrisies but never forgets their ache to be known."
——Imogen Dewey, The Guardian

"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

"Easton’s aspirations are bigger than merely documenting a social moment. By teasing out the particularity of his characters’ lives, he captures not just the deadening effect of capitalism’s cooption and commodification of every aspect of our lives, but the joys and disappointments of trying to build a space from which to resist."
——James Bradley, Saturday Paper

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Fiction 2024
LONGLISTED: Voss Literary Prize 2024

Max Easton’s follow-up to his Miles Franklin-longlisted debut novel, The Magpie Wing.

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 a writer from Sydney. His work has appeared in Mess+Noise, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin and Sydney Review of Books. He is the creator of Barely Human, a zine and podcast series exploring underground music’s ties to counterculture and subculture. His first novel, The Magpie Wing, was longlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award. His second work of fiction is Paradise Estate.