Lionel Shriver’s A Better Life, is a provocative novel addressing contemporary immigration, where a New York family takes in a Honduran migrant- who may or may not be the innocent paragon she claims to be. Shriver rages about the influx of illegal immigrants to America, but when asked if he writes op-eds about this, he replies “Oh no, no, no, no,.. I most certainly do not,”.

Gloria Bonaventura, living in a sprawling house in Brooklyn with her 26-year-old son Nico, an Italian American engineering major  who spent  four years since graduation telling on the dime of his divorced mother of three, decides to participate in a new city program that would pay her to take in a migrant as a boarder. Gloria is thrilled when sweet, kind, helpful Martine arrives. But Nico is sceptical. A classic live-at-home Gen Zer with no interest in adulthood, Nico resents any interruption of his “hovercraft repose.”

As the months go by, Martine endears herself to both Nico’s sisters, while finding her way into Gloria’s heart and even, briefly, Nico’s. “Like most impoverished refugees fleeing political persecution, Domingo had an Apple MacBook Pro” he notes, “ He sported  a formidable musculature, the kind you got from long, boring, and intermittently conflictful stints in prison. The interaction between Nico and his sisters Pragmatic Palermo and sentimental Vanessa  turns into portrait of sibling dynamics.

But as Martine’s disturbingly dodgy compatriots began to show up, Nico conceives a dark twin hostile to both his mother’s altruism and the “migrant crisis” in general- and turns out to be anything but a reliable narrator himself.

A Better Life, is a thriller fiction rooted in real-life social issues, is a story set in Brooklyn during the Biden administration, with Trump in the rearview mirror, smart, funny and sensitive to the moral nuances of perhaps the most divisive issue of our times and is based loosely on a program a New York City mayor floated but did not initiate.

The latter half of the novel is full of tirades delivered by Nico informed by social media, his estrange father (bolstered by his circle of right-of-center intellectuals”) and Vernon, a family friend working on a documentary about the people smuggling routes from Colombia and Panama. “ The pathway across the mountains is now so-well-trod by hundreds of  thousands of our add water and stir Americans that it’s become a migrant superhighway, the litter is worse than Coney Island” says Vernon.

When Honduran gangbangers with scalp tattoos turn up, things get absurd. “No less so than if the Nazis had billeted in their farm-house in France, The Bonaventuras were under occupation”, we are told.

A Better Life by Lionel Shriver, The Borough Press £22/ Harper $30, 304 pages.