Amy Taylor is a Melbourne novelist whose first book, Search History, made The Guardian’s best-of-the-year list. Ruins, her second, drops a couple into an Athens summer. Emma and Julian are house-sitting for a friend and quietly falling apart — she wants a next chapter, he’s swallowing the collapse of his academic career. Then they meet Lena, a young Greek woman who becomes the third point of the love triangle, and the whole thing turns into a slow-motion wreck. Taylor writes heat well: the stifling city, the appetite, the power running underneath. It’s sexy, mean, and hard to put down in one sitting.