ABSTRACT With a focus on a contemporary corpus of twenty-first-century Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek fiction that questions the peripheralization of these countries in European discourse, this essay aims to discuss Southern Europe as a literary space. Published around the 2008 financial crisis, these novels capture how the crisis’s onset precipitated the demise of a set of cultural, political, and institutional values previously taken for granted. Despite their national and local specificities, novels such as O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas (2002) by Lídia Jorge, Crematorio (2007) by Rafael Chirbes, Psomi, paideia, eleftheria (2012) by Petros Markaris, and I Chironi trilogy by Marcello Fois, critically reflect upon the long-standing realities of unequal development, historical hierarchies, and ambiguous positions within Europe, as well as upon deep-rooted orientalist perceptions of Europe’s South. A major trope cross-cuts these four novels: the so-called “economic miracles” of the second half of the twentieth century and their economic, political, cultural and environmental destructive drift as a major consequence of the accelerated modernization of late capitalism. Through our case studies, we develop our formal argument by exploring a crucial shared plot trigger: the death of a character as a metaphor for the ruins of a fading or collapsed modernity.