PLUME

by Will Wiles

(4th Estate £16.99, 352 pp) JACK BICK is young, ambitious and a barely functioning alcoholic who works as an interviewer for a glossy magazine, despite never turning up at the office in clean clothes — and often not turning up at all.

He knows he needs to land a big name to keep his job on track, so he interviews a writer who shot to fame on the back of a non-fiction account of a mugging.

Except it transpires that the writer made the whole book up.

This would be just the scoop Jack needs, had he not lost his dictaphone right after the interview. So follows a sweaty few days for Jack — who in his more paranoid moments is convinced a fire in Barking is slowly advancing through the city — and a confusing trip for the reader.

Wiles takes us deep into a subtly altered London at the mercy of the malign forces of gentrification, and seemingly in the hands of a mysterious tech maven whose new app can track every user at all times.

The narrative struggles to cohere, but it is an eerie and sometimes pretty sharp satire on the more sinister commodifications of modern life.