‘a furious take on housing inequality’—The Australian, ‘the big books of 2026’
Your dream home awaits – there’s only two things in your way…
The great Australian dream is slipping out of reach for Keira and her friends. No partner, no house, no kids. At 30-ahem, she is still languishing in a mould-filled share house, with an unexplained and ever-growing hole in the floorboards that threatens to consume her and her housemates.
Her part-time job as a nanny to a pair of atrocious twins – and her role as emotional support servant at the beck and call of their mother, Johanna – provides barely enough money for the G&Ts she finds necessary to get through her other job as a freelance copywriter – though it does allow her to steal a fancy avocado every now and then. Each day she can feel herself falling further and further behind.
When her best friend Dylan is able to buy an apartment with the help of his partner’s inheritance, Keira sees a way out. The bank of Mum and Dad. But what to do with parents who are in the rudest of health, and whose plans threaten to spend the only lifeline she has? From the lounge room of her rotting share house she hatches a deadly plan to speed up the process of wealth transfer.
An audacious book that asks just how far you will go to get your dream house (or at least a one bedroom flat without mushrooms growing in the bathroom).
PRAISE FOR KILL YOUR BOOMERS
‘When parental money becomes a looming solution, desperation sharpens into something darker – and all too recognisably millennial.’—The Sydney Morning Herald, Books to look forward to in 2026
‘the prose sings’—Books+Publishing
‘The gloriously vicious revenge plot “The Great Australian Dream” deserves. A devastating portrait of precarity. Funny, harsh, and sharp in all the right places. A book for the one-third of the population who've been kicked while they're down with a rent increase. A book for a well-meaning middle-class book club to fight over. A beautiful book. Another Wright success.’ —Bri Lee, author of Seed
‘This is a dark, hilarious and urgent book about a younger generation being locked out of the housing market and all the boomers who still think it's because they spend too much on avocado on toast.’ —Felicity Castagna, author of No More Boats
About the Author
Fiona Wright is a writer, editor, poet and critic from Sydney. Her book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger won the 2016 Nita B. Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for non-fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the NSW Premier’s Douglas Stewart Prize.
Her first poetry collection, Knuckled, won the 2012 Dame Mary Gilmore Award, while Domestic Interior was shortlisted for the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her most recent book of essays, The World Was Whole, was longlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize. She completed a PhD at Western Sydney University’s Writing & Society Research Centre. Her poems and essays have been published in TheAustralian, Meanjin, Island, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Seizure and HEAT.
