When David Brent is asked to describe his ultimate fantasy during the management training episode in the first series of The Office, he gets into a tangle expressing a desire for ‘some sort of everlasting… life you know, I don’t mean a sort, just a spiritual sort really in any sense, I mean actually to experience the future and live, you know, on and on and on, you know, know what it’s like to live forever’. One of his employees responds: ‘I think I’m starting to know what that’s like.’ Jaroslav Kalfař’s second novel, a dystopian satire on the fetishisation of immortality, has a similar eye for the terrors of going on and on and on.

Narrated by the disembodied spirit of Adéla Slavíková, a cashier at a supermarket near the Czech village she grew up in, it opens with a mordant flourish in 2029 as Adéla’s doctor tells her that she has a year to live, ‘give or take a month’. But Adéla’s back story has more dash than the provincial doldrums in which we find her might suggest. A former member of the Czech underground, she risked her life to oppose the communist regime before fleeing to Florida in the 1980s. The most enjoyable passages in the book relate her experiences as an illegal immigrant scratching out a living while working on a low-budget adaptation of Karel Capek’s 1936 novel War with the Newts, complete with an animatronic salamander named Rostislav. When The Great Newt War flopped at a student film festival, Adéla went home, giving up for adoption her infant daughter, Tereza.

Tereza now works for VITA, a New York-based tech firm in the mould of Theranos or Tesla, whose business is the pursuit of immortality. She is their most prominent ‘meat grinder’, a slighting term used by those working in the ‘booming permanence sector’ for scientists who believe the