This scatty, odd and comic novel is about squirrels, the pharmaceutical industry, and a couple who only really get to know each other after entering into an uncertain engagement. The Portable Veblen is about getting drawn into an unethical situation so slowly and seductively that you don’t notice your morals dropping away one by one, and then noticing all at once. It’s about not just surviving a childhood that should have screwed you up for good, but learning to appreciate the way it shaped you.

Veblen is the perfect character and I loved her instantly; eccentric, smart and unencumbered by all the things that are supposed to matter. She loves wildlife, her independence and the Norwegian language. Paul is her complementary opposite; career and money-driven, sensible and focussed. It’s only after they get decide to get married that they discover that the one thing they have in common, their dysfunctional families, might break them apart.

Having grown up frustrated by his hippy parents in a commune, with a disabled brother and a marijuana farm monopolising his parents attention, Paul is rebelliously successful and straight-laced. He’s a doctor, collecting letters after his name and about to embark on the biggest clinical trial of his career after he and his new medical device are headhunted by the kind of pharmaceutical company his parents read conspiracy stories about. Meanwhile, Veblen craves the impossible approval of her hypochondriac mother, and placates her frequent over-sensitive and self-involved outbursts. She rarely sees her veteran father who, absent for most of her childhood save for terrifying annual visits, is growing prematurely old in a care home.

But weddings draw even the most unwilling families together, and ‘meeting the parents’ kicks up a whirlwind of trouble for the new couple, taking them on a funny, dark and peculiar journey, facing family, expectations and doubts that that they must survive together if they are going to make it to their wedding day.