Max Easton’s 2021 debut The Magpie Wing invited you to invest so much in his characters that his choice to return to them two years later in Paradise Estate feels almost like fan service. You don’t have to have read that novel to enjoy this – but it helps.
The Magpie Wing had several heroes, but ruthlessly perceptive, vulnerable Helen Coleman was a standout. She’s 37 when Paradise Estate opens, undone by a breakup, “sucked dry” by another, more enormous grief, and looking for somewhere to live. Covid’s peak has passed but Sydney’s post-pandemic malaise is still taking form. Lives have been “on hold until things were declared safe”. But safety, for Easton, is an unstable quantity. Over 2022 Helen and the group she assembles to populate her Hurlstone Park sharehouse face floods, mould, a boringly vicious rental market, the ambient distress of the climate disaster and of a lethally apathetic body politic – and each other.
