Asha Ray is a “brightest of her generation” computer scientist halfway through her PhD when she bumps into her former high school crush, the charismatic Cyrus. Falling madly in love, they come up with the idea for a social networking app to give meaning to our everyday lives. Asha is the brains, Cyrus the frontman, and his friend Julian the business handler. Together they form the kind of triumvirate startup that dreams are made of: equal parts in a greater whole. But as WAI (We Are Infinite) takes off in ways Asha never imagined, it becomes obvious that one of them is more equal than the others.

It’s easy to recall a time when Tahmima Anam’s new novel, a pacy satire set in a secretive tech “incubator”, might have passed for science fiction. Not any longer. From the all-consuming social media platform that hogs centre stage to the deadly pandemic that looms over its ending, The Startup Wife pulses with up-to-the-minute topicality. Real-world parallels can be found for even its most far-fetched notions. Software that channels the voice of a deceased loved one? Microsoft patented something very similar at the start of this year (note to IT bosses: Anam’s version goes catastrophically awry).

Look beyond the bleeding-edge technology and apocalyptic anxieties, however, and you’ll find a cautionary tale as old as time: a woman invents something, a guy takes the credit. In keeping with the credo of its backdrop (“Change is everything”), Anam is out to disrupt this narrative, embedding her efforts in a quest for love and self-determination, and swiping as she goes at an industry in which innovation has far outpaced regulation, leaving ethics in the dust. The end result may not be entirely persuasive philosophically, but as high-octane entertainment that hits notes poignant as well as savagely witty, it soars.

Welcome to Utopia — not an idyllic arcadia but a secretive tech incubator in a Manhattan office block. Here a computer scientist, Asha Ray, the narrator of The Startup Wife, her charismatic husband Cyrus and best friend Jules are nervously pitching their app platform — Asha’s cutting-edge algorithm aimed at people yearning for ritual without religion. Drawing on dreams, obsessions and secret desires — an Odyssey wedding, Game of Thrones funeral, pharaonic celebration — the app will create micro-communities of users; a virtual parish.

Their startup gets the crucial nod, and they join the cool, shiny Utopians who are pursuing projects to support humanity ‘when there’s nothing left’. ‘You’re planning for the apocalypse?’ Jules asks. On the office roof they’re growing vegetables, with self-generated electricity instead of soil, ‘for when the bee population collapses’. Other cheerful prospects include mass antibiotic resistance, climate collapse, world war — and a deadly pandemic, but nobody’s paying attention to that. And not everyone is catastrophising: instant orgasms at board meetings for busy women? There’s a startup for that.