Paradise Estate

(Paperback)

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The new novel from the author of The Magpie Wing, longlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Its 2022 and Helen is starting again. Newly single, adrift in an uncaring rental market, she finds a four-bedroom house flanked by apartment blocks that stare into the yard from all sides. Despite the lack of privacy, she fills its rooms with an unlikely group of residents looking for communal harmony: a zine maker working on a punk music archive; an activist writing about Australian anti-communism; an academic launching a return of guerrilla gardening; and a part-time rugby league player who has one chance to play for his country before retirement. Each is looking to build a future, each is haunted by their recent past.

If a four-bedroom share house in Sydney could ever promise salvation, it would come with a coating of black mould. Against the backdrop of pandemic and war, climate and housing crises, Paradise Estate finds its residents surrounded by generational confusion, stranded by housing scarcity and social malaise. Written with ironic wit and an eye for contemporary events, Eastons second novel sets the pessimism of its times against the optimism of the will. When isolation and atomisation are what we are given, what can be made from coming together

Praise for The Magpie Wing:

An original, exceptional novel. The Guardian

An anxious novel about anxious characters in anxious times. It seeks to register this anxiety in all of its contradictions and complexities, but thankfully does not want to resolve it. Sydney Review of Books

A moving portrait of a city and region undergoing enormous change, told through the perspectives of three unique, sympathetic and vulnerable characters. Books+Publishing