The sadly departed Terry Pratchett once said, ‘Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.’ While it is difficult to imagine anyone claiming that the great fantasist had no right to tell the stories of witches, orang-utans, and sentient luggage, authors of literary fiction have lately been held to a different standard. Lionel Shriver has been foremost in the cross-hairs, a fact she addresses in Property, her thirteenth book and first short story collection.

Shriver’s public pronouncements on cultural appropriation and defence of imaginative fiction condemn her new work to intense scrutiny, which will not always be conducted in a spirit of critical objectivity.