Bonding by Mariel Franklin review – a comprehensive vision

Populated by tech and pharma hustlers, this bold and highly impressive debut novel has its thumb right over the sore spots of modern life

It’s rare but it does happen: a debut novel comes along that’s so obviously impressive, so advanced in the reach of its ideas and the gracefulness of its execution, that you want to start proselytising for it before you’ve even turned the final page. With its dissident intelligence and its comprehensive vision of a devastated social sphere, Mariel Franklin’s Bonding is the work of an author whose importance already feels assured.

Zoning in on a milieu of tech and pharmaceutical workers in 2020s London, Bonding depicts western society as a juggernaut zombie, digitally reconfigured and bereft of a coherent system of values, that staggers onwards in flight from an all-pervading truth: “no one had any idea how to live”.

Bonding by Mariel Franklin is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply