After selling the film rights of her dystopian first novel, The End We Start From, to Benedict Cumberbatch, you’d think Megan Hunter might try to double down on her success. But in The Harpy, she pivots towards domestic drama, exchanging post-apocalyptic futures for suburban kitchens and lower-middle-class dinner party tension.

The novel centres on failed PhD student Lucy Stevenson, mother of two, freelance copywriter and wife of bee expert Jake. After discovering Jake’s infidelity with an older colleague, Lucy agrees to her husband’s plan to save their marriage: she