Edi is facing a disciplinary since her “incident” at work. Forty-seven years in Admin processing the newly dead is not how she foresaw eternity.

The Delusions is the tale of a woman processing souls in the afterlife. In Arrivals, the newly dead must take the stages in order: first extract delusion; second, answer HR’s questionnaire truthfully. Yet who among them can truly face who they are? Who may never pass at all? As leader board numbers begin to rise at unprecedented rates, rumours begin to fly. Humans are about to become a banned race. The earth is going to be repossessed.

The book’s narrator a tattoo artist named Edi, died young on the operating table at the hands of an arrogant surgeon poking at a cancerous tumour careless of her life and that of her son, Ivor, who is left behind.

As chaos descends, Edi hopes this might finally be the moment she has waited for, so she might see her son again who she was forced to leave on Earth when she died. Edi wants to be the one waiting for him, even it HR protocols forbid it. Looking out at the millions of newly dead arriving, Edi has one question – What might any of us truly be willing to do for those we love at the doors of eternity?

Against a spectacular backdrop of stars, constellations and comets, a mass extinction event begins to unfurl watched by the entire universe as Processing, the largest soul terminus in existence, decides it is now time to take matters wholly back into its own hands. With reflections on love, defiance and light, The Delusions, is a story of profound human connection, on an unprecedented scale.

With references to scanner wands, leader boards. And long fidgety queues, Processing is a miserable hybrid of airport security and Ellis Island, overseen by a faceless and slight hackneyed force known as HR. It proves a testing place in which to dwell, but Edi and her colleagues are stuck there for eternity, getting high after their shifts on astral dust and drinking in a galactic bar called the Galileo, where they are faced with a succession of souls who expect to retain their earthly privileges indefinitely. The disembodied dead try to pat themselves down for smartphones that no longer exist, and throw tantrums when the realisation drops that wealth is mortal, too. Even psychopaths want absolution. “Like I’m some kind of soul travel agent and they all expect first class and perks.”

 “Soul terminus” is a place of timeless human weakness, which must meet a non-negotiable judgement. The soul can only “Pass” when all its delusions are extracted, like a moral tapeworm. “That’s a good four-metre-long beast of frenetic Delusion that he is holding down” Edi observes of a late used-car salesman.

The parade of pride, violence and tragedy that has to be reckoned with, where only the punishments here if delusions are not expelled include atomic dissolution, universal exile or a purgatory of Trapped Souls and Lost Souls. There’s also a Performance of Cruelty theatre where sinners are endlessly condemned to suffer what they inflicted on their victims.

Fagan through Edi’s voice, veers into rants about modern life and gratuitous riffs on thrill of meeting historical figures in the afterlife.

The delusions by Jenni Fagan, Heinemann £18.99 , 320 pages.