Sophie Pattison, 37, is not in a good place: heartbroken, childless, mid-divorce from ‘arsehole’ Paul, with her self-esteem and bank balance low. As her best friend Emma says: ‘You have a lot of love and nobody to take it out on.’

This is Meg Mason’s third work of fiction. Her Sorrow and Bliss (2020)propelled her on to the global literary stage. Sophie, Standing There opens as ‘sad girl fiction’ that satirises the contemporary literary festival. But then the book takes a turn and explores something more savage: parasocial relationships and the courage required in the Age of Instagram to be simple but happy.

It opens with Sophie in the wings of a theatre, mic’ing up celebrated, often rude, authors before they go on stage. Mason namechecks a few very real star writers, stroking or swiping them as she pleases. George Saunders gets a swat as Sophie forgets the name of his bestseller – ‘that book, Lincoln in the Something’. In Sophie’s world there exists another ‘bardo’: the gulf between an eminent author and festival staff, awkward when breached by eager beavers or wannabe writers.

There are delicious digs at the book festival world and its buzzwords and phrases, such as ‘intersectional’ and ‘emotional labour’; at Gen-Z: ‘Jodes aimed to read one book a year and often got close to it’; and at YA fiction tropes: ‘A character came in, a woman, who was beautiful and didn’t know it.’ Sophie’s ex, who lords it over her, is squashed in four words: ‘His vocabulary wasn’t huge.’

The novel sympathises with, but also ridicules, the thirtysomething woman who is so frightened by life she silently prays for invitations but then retreats: ‘Why not give in and sob in the toilets?’ As shattered, masochistic Sophie watches work and love opportunities sail by like untethered lifecraft, I found myself musing: well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of your own actions.

But then she becomes obsessed with a superstar 35-year-old writer called Lilac Dunne, whose books, interviews and pearls of podcast wisdom become the soundtrack to her existence for six months: ‘To her private heart, the author was everything. Sometimes it felt like the great love of her life.’ When Sophie admits her naivety – ‘Same with unreliable narrators. I just take their word for it, and then I’m shocked when it turns out they were lying from start to finish’ – we wonder whether she is herself an unreliable narrator, whose own truth we blindly accept.

Then, quite unexpectedly, Lilac comes to speak at a festival where Sophie is working and the story takes a wonderfully queasy swerve. The reader is led skilfully along, seasick yet emotionally invested, to a satisfying, page-turning denouement.