THE UNINVITED

(Bloomsbury Circus £12.99 % £10.99)

ASPERGER’S-AFFLiCTED protagonists are surely nearing their sell-by- dates but there’s nothing jaded about this psycho/eco thriller, in spite of its socially-challenged star.

Hesketh Lock is an anthropologist whose condition comes in handy when coolly analysing the human race. But even rationalist Hesketh is rattled by a global outbreak of industrial sabotage and employee suicides.

These are nothing, however, compared to another new and appalling pandemic: that of young children slaying their parents with everything from knives to nail-guns.

Fiction tends to lag far behind real-world events, but Liz Jensen here references everything from the popularity of Swedish crime fiction to the worldwide death of honeybees and (crucially) the paradigmshifting experiments of physicists at CERn’s Hadron Collider.

it’s in part this that makes her eighth novel so compelling and, unlike some tales of approaching apocalypse, hers positively races with ideas.

As Hesketh begins to understand how these two bizarre new phenomena might be linked, he finds himself forced to imagine the impossible — but what will become of his beloved seven-year- old son, the only person with whom hermit Hesketh truly longs to connect?

Expertly paced, combining moments of chilling horror with deadpan comedy, this audacious novel is utterly gripping.