It’s 2023, and not much has changed for Helen. She’s traded her cinema job for one in a bottle shop, and her sharehouse for an apartment with her older acquaintance Pat, a sound guy who only leaves the couch for work. Likewise for her former housemate Sunny, who continues to obsess over their “anti-hardcore” band HDPE, and has moved in with an inevitably rekindled love interest in Sio, who waits for a day when Sunny will relax. As these four characters' lives intertwine through the underground punk scenes of Sydney, a rising protest movement, and endless ecorts to find a satisfactory social and creative life, they witness the crumbling of each other’s facades. Who will pull out that “one last” radical act that will cement their place in a history that seems intent on repeating itself? The third entry in a series of acclaimed novels that includes ‘The Magpie Wing’ and ‘Paradise Estate’, ‘Now, Autonomy’ expands Max Easton’s project of documenting the drastically changing modes of contemporary life through a subcultural lens. In a world where lessons are always there to be ignored, this book is intent on interrogating the present, even when echoes of the past become deafening.