Your Inner Australopithecus

Three million years ago, a bush moved and somebody shouted. We have been shouting ever since.

Colin works in purchasing for an electrical wholesaler in Croydon, waters his balcony plants with religious devotion and has never once been rude to the man at the corner shop. Every morning, on the bus, he discovers he is furious about a box of cereal.

His Auntie Maureen forwards urgent voice notes at 6:30 a.m. and likes every photo of a former boyfriend's allotment in Blackpool. His nephew Josh swipes left on eighty-four women between two Tube stations, poses with a fish he did not catch and pays a man in a rented Lamborghini £997 to teach him to be a wolf. And in a townhouse off Mount Street with no name beside the doorbell, a woman who knows exactly how to address the wife of an earl's younger son pays a fortune, every Thursday, to be addressed as nothing at all.

They are not the problem. They are primates doing what primates have always done: shouting at bushes, grooming allies, flexing on rocks, bringing meat to dates and eating the red berries because everyone else is. The problem is the people who learned to sell it to them - the algorithm, the dating app "designed to be deleted," the gym that profits from your absence, the diamond that was forever, the meeting room named after a mountain.

Your Inner Australopithecus is a merciless, affectionate and very funny tour of modern London as seen from the savanna - with real science, ridiculous institutions and a cast you will not want to leave. Somewhere between a field guide and a comic novel, it will make you laugh at the species, forgive the individual and look at your phone's little red circle in an entirely new light.

Affectionate with people. Merciless with institutions. Warning: may cause you to recognize your entire family.