Ellena Savage’s debut novel, The Ruiners, starts with a windfall many of us only casually dream of – A$50,000 gifted out of the blue.
It’s a financial reprieve Pip desperately needs. Savage’s 29-year-old protagonist is a disaffected waitress, haunted by the screams of the lobsters she serves each night to overbearing, bib-wearing patrons. “Mummy” is dead. Her estranged father is too. But the lump sum in his will? That’s a ticket out of lingering debt – and out of Melbourne, all the way to a “moist and mouldy” fixer-upper on the Greek island of Fokos.
