Saul Leslie’s debut, A Working Title I Want to Change, may be the first novel ever set primarily in a Tesco superstore. It opens in October 2013, as the unnamed narrator begins his induction at the ‘flagship’ branch of Tesco in Kensington. He has come to London for an MA in English but he skips seminars to stack shelves. As the months pass he grows angry with the company’s wastefulness and resorts to petty theft: a TfL Freedom Pass here, a £50 note there. These are the days of austerity Britain and the narrator is ‘surfing sofas’. Variation is supplied by the characters who put him up: family friend Lottie and her xenophobic, GTA V-obsessed husband; double bass-playing Lance; ‘steampunk’ cinephile Freddy; and Hungarian coursemate Dom.

Leslie’s portrait of an intellectually pretentious MA student is mostly convincing. His slang is typically millennial and markedly uncool: food is ‘scran’, a flat is ‘digs’, gossip is ‘scuttlebutt’. But some of Leslie’s similes are daft or even offensive: a character’s hair is gelled into ‘spikes like hostile architecture that