One of the sharpest and funniest Australian debuts of recent years, Green Dot follows Hera Stephen, a disaffected twenty-four-year-old who drifts into a government communications job and begins an affair with an older, married colleague.

This is very much a novel about boredom, precarity, ambition, self-delusion and the emotional logic of modern white-collar life. Rather than treating the affair as melodrama, Madeleine Gray uses it as a way into the fantasies people build around work, class and desire.

Gray writes with a voice that feels remarkably contemporary without chasing trends. The novel is packed with dry observational humour and biting social commentary, yet beneath its wit lies a genuine sadness about work as identity, the gig economy, loneliness, and the impossible task of constructing a coherent self in late capitalism. Inevitably compared to writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Patricia Lockwood and Sally Rooney, Green Dot ultimately feels distinctively Australian in its sense of aimlessness and institutional absurdity. 

2023 Allen & Unwin paperback. Very good condition with only light shelf wear. Clean, bright and tightly bound.