May 2026

Yesteryear

Yesteryear: is this viral novel’s time travelling tradwife really ‘perfect at being alive’?

Cottonbro/Pexels Rachel Williamson, Lecturer in English, University of Canterbury The film rights for Caro Claire Burke’s buzzy debut novel were sold to Amazon MGM Studios before publication. Adaptation plans are well underway, with Anne Hathaway, cited in the acknowledgements as “instrumental in bringing Natalie to life”, set to star and produce. Yesteryear follows self-professed “flawless Christian woman” and tradwife influencer Natalie Heller Mills, who wakes up one morning to find herself mysteriously transported back in time to 1855 pioneer America. The house and children look similar to her own, but something is off. Her top-of-the-line kitchen appliances have vanished, her husband Caleb treats her with barely contained simmering violence, and the food tastes awful. Part satire, part dystopian horror, Yesteryear shifts between this uncanny version of the past and the present-day. Is this time travel, Natalie wonders. A reality TV show? Or maybe even a test of faith set by God Almighty himself? Unsurprisingly, the book’s sensational premise combined with its zeitgeisty topic, has generated hype and anticipation, including praise from both BookTokkers and critics. Hathaway has lent her star power to the book’s marketing campaign, posting glossy videos of herself unwrapping and reading from it. This leveraging of social media celebrity seems particularly apt, given Burke’s interest in womanhood, performance and fame within the queasy and hypocritical world of Instagram tradwives. Yesteryear is her thought experiment into what happens when we push the tradwife phenomenon to its seemingly inevitable, deeply unsettling conclusion. Caro Claire Burke. Aistė Saulytė/Penguin Random House ‘America hates women’ The word “tradwife” first appears in the opening pages, when Natalie’s teenage daughter asks what it means. A combination of “traditional” and “wife”, the tradwife is a hyperfeminised retrograde social figure, embracing a 1950s aesthetic and return to traditional gender roles. She is a loving wife and doting stay-at-home mum. She bakes her own bread, preserves […]

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The Ruiners

 by Ellena Savage A dazzling, subversive debut novel by the acclaimed author of blueberries about love, lust, legacy and the last days of civilisation as we know it. ‘Is there any hope for us? is not a question we can answer, and this book does it brilliantly.’ Lauren Olyer, author of No Judgement What do we inherit from the world and the people in it? And what do we do with that inheritance? Pip’s life is going nowhere. She’s a university drop-out stuck in a dead-end job at a Melbourne lobster shack. But when her long-absent father dies, she’s left an orphan and fifty-thousand dollars richer. She doesn’t know what to do with her windfall until she meets Sasha, a dashing young scholar of Balkan literature. Together, they hatch a mad plan: buy a decrepit house on a distressed Greek island where Sasha will write and Pip will sort out what to do with her life. However, instead of bohemian idyll, the couple find themselves ensnared in an environmental struggle that brings the mistakes of the past into sharp relief. A dazzling, subversive debut novel by the acclaimed author of Blueberries, this is a literary page-turner about love, lust, legacy and the last days of civilisation as we know it. Instead of hiding from the world we’ve inherited, The Ruiners asks how we can create a better one. ‘With a scathing wit and genuine narrative flair, Ellena Savage has written a contemporary parable about gentrification, class, climate change and the need for political action in a society that seems to leave it less and less agency.’’ Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection