The Isle of Dogs
By Daniel Davies
Serpent’s Tale £7.99, 186 pages
FT Bookshop price: £6.39

Disillusioned men’s style magazine editor Jeremy Shepherd gives up his job in London to live with his parents in an anonymous provincial town.

Working as a low-ranking civil servant by day, he spends his evenings having sex with strangers in public car parks, until a combination of angry locals and a tabloid newspaper sting threatens his hobby.

With its detached style and sexual frankness, Daniel Davies’ first novel nods knowingly to the work of JG Ballard and Michel Houellebecq. The Isle of Dogs may not quite have the otherworldly strangeness of the former, or the latter’s ability to disturb, but Davies writes lean prose. He keeps up the suspense while infusing his portrait of a celebrity-obsessed nation with laconic wit.

It is left to readers to judge whether Jeremy is an idealist pioneering a more “authentic” way of living or simply a slacker with a one-track mind.