Max Easton - Paradise Estate Book

I don't feel well equipped to write about writing. I am oblivious as to if Max Easton is a "good" writer in the technical sense. But in saying that I’m not concerned about “good playing” in music, but whether music creates some type of meaning.

'Paradise Estate', the follow up to his debut novel 'The Magpie Wing', feels as if it has peeled open my skull, extracted and further fleshed out my internal thoughts and crises regarding the entanglement of underground music, forming communities, alienation in contemporary society, a sense of purpose, politics, gentrification, the meaning of all thing, getting older, what is to be done etc.

Tackling these topics via the narrative fiction form allows the holes and hopes to be found in multiple positions of an argument. A format that I think is more philosophically stimulating and necessary a kick-off point for underground music/culture dialogue (especially in Sydney) than, say, a series of polemic essays.

Yeah it's a book about a cast of characters I neither love nor hate inhabiting a dilapidated sharehouse, but it's much more than that. - Nic

From Giramondo........ 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?

Written with ironic wit and an eye for contemporary events, the follow-up to Max Easton’s acclaimed debut, The Magpie Wing, sets the pessimism of its times against the optimism of the will.