Over the last three decades, the American writer Lydia Millet has built up a body of largely uncategorisable work that skirts the borders of comedy, climate fiction, horror, political satire and much else besides. Her latest novel, Dinosaurs, is another mongrel. It focuses on Gil, a wealthy, idealistic 45-year-old who, before the novel begins, has left his home in New York and embarked on a five-month trek across the country to Arizona to begin a new life there.

It is characteristic of Millet’s style that this big, baffling set piece happens entirely off-stage. Dinosaurs is an almost plotless novel – not in the sense that it is impressionistic or poetic, but in the sense that nearly everything that happens to Gil feels unremarkable. This is both