‘What I am aiming for is just one way to understand the rich and productive history of the Capmeadow Expansion Project,’ the voice of the archivist suavely tells us in the second chapter of Ben Pester’s first novel. ‘There are many, many others.’

Capmeadow, we learn gradually, is the site of a business park where the novel’s main character, Tom Crowley, is employed. His main duty is ‘to write messaging’. It doesn’t take a cryptic crossword master to notice that ‘Capmeadow’ could be another way of saying ‘Hatfield’, the name of a postwar new town in Hertfordshire that is home to a major business park. But if you think you are about to read a realist novel about everyday life and work in 21st-century England, you have another think coming. When Tom brings his eight-year-old daughter to work, loses her, then becomes uncertain whether she is in fact missing or safe at home, whether she came to Capmeadow with him in the first place and whether there even was a bring your daughter to work day, this is just the start of the undoing of the normal rules of novelistic representation.

What emerges is a radically untethered fictional world in which characters can occupy two different places at once – they can be both lost and at home, both scaling the walls of a castle and in an online meeting. All the dimensions of reality seem to bend; the possibility of