Consider Pen's revulsion at her new husband's disgusting old Labrador, Bennett. All he wants is a pat on the head but "the drool dangled from his chops as Pen prepared his lunch or his dinner, spooning biscuity meal and chunks of Chum into the bowl labelled DOG." But once Bennett is dead, she tearfully spies his bowl, his bone, his blanket, his beanbag. "Admirable really. If only she could have been so free of frippery."

Here are some of the themes Walker touches on with unnerving accuracy and authority: middle-aged lovemaking, including Pen's awareness of "her flaccid old flesh and the loose hanging flab where her tricep ought to have been"; the features of cool young men's indie bikes, down to their DT Deep Swiss rims; the social lives of the young in Hoxton or London Fields with their sofas found on skips, their conversation replaced by friending, trending, tagging, posting, browsing Facebook profiles, their thumbs going like pistons as they stare at their screens, their resentment at the Baby Boomer generation who wrecked the planet and the economy.

Poor Conrad. Made famous in infancy like Christopher Robin, he was raised to expect a career in a creative profession — his post-uni jobs included "six months shifting at Disastrous TV" — but is unprepared for disappointment, and he is now Conrad the amiable failure, stacking shelves. The sale of his parents' house would clear all his debts at a stroke. His cyber-freak sister Isobel is savvier.  Her foray into journalism at uni (a story printed by the Daily Mail as "Booze Shame Of Britain's Students") leads only to unpaid internships supplemented by barmaid shifts. To escape from the threat of a spinsterish mother-daughter symbiosis with Pen, she flees to the Emirates and ensnares a German banker. Nightmarish-sounding life in Dubai, where traffic control is left to Allah, is lightened by two Australian characters whose speech patterns are captured unerringly here. 

Walker is more than a generation away from Piers Paul Read, but his novel sometimes reminded me of Read's 2010 novel The Misogynist, a bleakly hilarious portrait of a mid-life crisis in London. I don't think Read would have subjected readers to Tim Walker's agonisingly destructive climax, like Grand Theft Auto V. But I hope neither will mind if I mention that Walker is Read's son-in-law, who has made a corker of a debut.