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IT’S 2013. Fay Weldon’s alter ego Frances, an 80-year-old novelist, sits waiting for the bailiffs (or the secret police of near-future dystopia) to break in, and muses on the greed-is-good decades of celebrity, cheery traffic jams and maxed-out credit cards that brought her to this pass.

The house on Chalcot Crescent is very like the real house in London’s Primrose Hill that Weldon occupied in the glory days of her generation. Frances’s past, delivered in bite-sized chapters, is close to Weldon’s. There is an ironic sub-plot about industrial-scale cannibalism, and a sketchy conspiracy to overthrow the brutal government – but this is Orwellian nightmare recast for the Twittering classes. There is more skewed memoir than grim future or alternate universe, but you’ll be entertained if you enjoy Weldon’s trademark barbed frivolity.

Sci-fi special: The fiction of now