“We didn’t take off our shoes which made a difference, morally,” reasons Ray. We first encounter Ray at a party where Marie, who is crushingly beautiful, lures him into non-sexual encounter on the cusp of ethical dubiety. His friend Marie, he notes (with expert punctuation and exquisite bathos), has a job in research which “involved having deep, personal conversations with ordinary people about, for example, life, death, love and fate, as a way to better understand, for example, dishwasher tablets”. He spots someone with a phone in a rubber casing designed “for people who lead extreme lives”. He cites a scientific study “that proves holding hot drinks makes people appear warmer, kinder, more trustworthy”. The science of ubiquitous marketing skews Ray’s perceptions. His emotional barometer is stuck on cynicism, which rates and devalues every experience, even when it’s watching a child prodigy play the violin: “It’s easy to get a standing ovation when the seats are so uncomfortable,” he says churlishly. Ray is strung between two worlds sartorially too: he dresses in a brand which gestures at adulthood but enables him to “not lose contact with the atmosphere of skateboarding”. He remembers having once enjoyed this demeaning labour as something he could fondly reminisce about in future inteviews reflecting on his brilliant success: projection and retrospection in one delusional package. He is that very contemporary flop, a freelance tech journo generating pointless copy from home for a poor return. Ray will inadvertently be sucked into that narrative, but first he must prove himself unreliable in other ways. It’s 2011, when the capital plays host to an outbreak of riots and looting. They’re all from out of town but have osmotically adopted London foibles such as kissing both cheeks: “if, at first, there’d been a little sarcasm in it – we were making fun of theatre people – that was gone now and we were just those people”. “We were not the kind of friendship group who valued muscles,” confides Ray, Dunthorne's narrator. The Adulterants relocates to a patch of north-east London where a coterie of thirtysomethings are trying to see their way onto the property ladder. The first two novels were set in or around Swansea, where Dunthorne grew up. There has been quite a wait for The Adulterants, a contemporary tour of several of the deadly sins, but it's been worth it. It was a happy setting for an author intrigued by the perpetual weirdness of human behaviour.

Joe dunthorne