The daughter of a cold, self-interested investment banker and a once formidable conductor, Gael is both bloody minded and contemptuous of those that exploit the weak - a sentiment engendered by her adolescence spent looking out for her vulnerable younger brother Guthrie in depressed post-crash Dublin. When her parents separate, Gael sets out into a world being remade in the image of greed and, moving by her wit and her singlemindedness, cuts a swathe through the leather-lined, coke-dusted social clubs of London, the New York gallery scene and birth-throes of the Occupy movement.

A modern-day bildungsroman, Orchid & the Wasp is a novel that chews through sexuality, class and contemporary politics and that crackles with the joyful fury and anarchic gall of writers such as Nell Zink and Ottessa Moshfegh.