For a book that calls itself a collection of short stories, and promises as many as sixteen of them on its contents page, Camilla Grudova’s The Coiled Serpent is curiously short on actual story. There are three or four entries, perhaps, that have the generally accepted requirements of one – action that escalates, characters that change – but that amounts to a conspicuous minority. What readers are principally offered, instead, is a series of scene-settings: of starts to stories, but rarely the whole shebang.

One can almost forgive this in a writer as imaginative and politically engaged as Grudova. In the opening “story”, “Through Ceilings and Walls”, a young woman visits an island to investigate “the purported site of some important Roman remains”. We are not told which island, though from its antiquities and English-speakers we have a pretty good idea. It is not quite a Britain we recognize, however. At the train station all our character can find to buy is “tea in a grey paper cup, a small boiled potato wrapped in foil and a chocolate bar”. The only shop in town is a butcher’s. And back in her shabby guesthouse there are no televisions or newspapers, “no news of the outside world”, only a copy of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher.

Our immediate thought is that this is a Britain of sixty or seventy years past. But then there are the subtle suggestions of a more sinister truth: the fact that the country’s prime minister has been in post “since long before I was born”; the picture of “a royal wedding from long ago”, in which “the bride’s face and hands were blocked out with green crayon scribbles”; the hostility our protagonist incurs for her short hair and masculine clothes. Where we are, it slowly dawns on us, is a Britain as dreamt of by nativist nostalgists; a country divorced not just from the EU, but from modern life entirely; a place where royalty is lionized – providing it conforms. In its very plausibility it is chilling.

But the story doesn’t mature beyond this initial set-up. Rather than cultivate the compelling dystopian mystery she has so painstakingly constructed, Grudova makes a beeline for Act V, abruptly wrapping the whole thing up with some cheap haunted-house theatrics. There is no character development, no narrative. And this is pretty much the template for the...