Paradise Estate

By: Max Easton

Narrated by: Gemma Carfi

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?

©2023 Max Easton. First published by Giramondo Publishing (P)2024 Bolinda Publishing

Critic reviews

'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, author of Green Dot)