Alam also makes the interesting decision to reject the most common complicating factor in most “morality” novels: love. Brooke scorns Asher’s assertion that love is more important than money, stating that she is “married to herself”, and even that she wants to “marry” the apartment she is so desperate to acquire. But whereas love can make humans behave in surprisingly good and surprisingly bad ways, simple greed is likely to have fairly predictable outcomes.

Where the story is more interesting is in its troubling of issues of race and class loyalty. Brooke pushes back against the assumptions from other black characters that she will, or should, choose affiliation with them over her white employer, simply because she is black. There is a moment when she makes a conscious decision to snub her boss’s black driver, deciding that “he would be, to her, only what he was to Asher”. Yet, this narrative thread – along with many others, such as the consequences of Brooke’s increasing cruelty towards her friends and family, and even the strange sub-plot of the “Subway Pricker” mentioned in the opening line – is left dangling.

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Brooke’s “moral dilemmas” ultimately never seem urgent to the reader. Rather, they read as symptoms of a kind of mental “derangement”, as Alam has called it in an interview, which seems to be caused simply by her proximity to extreme wealth. Yet none of Asher Jaffee’s other employees succumb to this same derangement. In the end, Brooke is such a thin character, and our experience of her so slight before she begins exhibiting these signs of delusional entitlement, that the reader is likely to wonder whether she is simply a mild sociopath, and has always been one.

In Entitlement, Alam has removed the diverting fun of apocalyptic genre tropes that kept Leave the World Behind humming along, but the “big questions” he’s chosen to place front and centre here are ultimately neither morally complex nor particularly interesting.