The Ruiners (Ellena Savage, Summit)

Ellena Savage’s debut novel, The Ruiners, introduces a narrator suspended between self-awareness and self-sabotage: a 29-year-old waitress, working at casino-adjacent lobster shack Claws, whose life feels both theatrically doomed and stubbornly ordinary. She fantasises about Paris and London but remains tethered to Melbourne by consumer debt and a paralysing lack of courage. When a solicitor informs her that she has a modest inheritance from the father she barely knew, she reframes herself as a Dickensian heroine – “an orphan and a beneficiary” – poised for thrilling reinvention. Savage (Blueberries) excels at anatomising millennial precarity without lapsing into sentimentality. With its imported lobsters and vague “net-zero” claims, Claws becomes a grotesque emblem of late capitalism, its bound crustaceans echoing the narrator’s own sense of captivity. The prose is sharp and darkly comic, skewering creative-industry posturing and the moral vanity of diners who tip to display their impeccable class-consciousness. A volatile romance with Sasha, a self-mythologising writer, intensifies the novel’s preoccupation with ambition and submission – to art, to love, to inherited scripts. Savage is acutely attuned to the ways in which ideology and intimacy entwine, as well as to the seductive pull of narrating one’s life as a process of transformation rather than repetition. Wry and emotionally ferocious, The Ruiners interrogates what it means to reshape the story of who you are – and whether any of it can truly set you free. For readers of Madeleine Watts’ The Inland Sea, Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Ella Baxter’s Woo Woo.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Ellie Fisher (she/they) is a writer. Her work has appeared in print and online. Ellie is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Western Australia. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Friday Unlocked reviews Reviews