Chillingly, the idea of a state-sanctioned universal standard for successful mothering isn’t entirely a product of Chan’s imagination, but was inspired by a New Yorker article she read about a single mother who left her son at home alone for several hours and lost custody of him.

‘The lawyers, the social workers, the family court judge spoke about motherhood in such a clinical way, as something that could be measured,’ she recalls. ‘That was terrifying to me. I think that’s what planted the seed for the dolls in my mind.’

Ah, the dolls. In one of the seemingly more far-fetched details of the book, each parent in the institution is given a lifelike child – using ‘the latest advances in robotics and artificial intelligence’ – to help with their training. But far from merely being practice aids, the robot toddlers collect data on them: their heart rates, eye contact, the ‘authenticity’ of their emotions. ‘They can move and speak and smell and feel like real children… They can think. They are sentient beings,’ Chan writes.

Add these creepy automaton children to the book’s wall-to-wall CCTV, guards and the mothers being asked to police one another, and the sense of being watched is stifling. Yet the surveillance, Chan points out, is one of the most realistic elements of the book. The dolls, she adds, ‘actually do what our phones do in terms of tracking data about us ’.

Even creepier is that Frida’s neighbour is the one who calls the police, after hearing Harriet crying. An entirely reasonable reaction, but one that takes on a different edge for British readers in the wake of having been asked to keep tabs on our neighbours during the Covid lockdowns.

‘I think the surveillance reads differently in the UK, where cameras really are everywhere,’ agrees Chan, who studied at Oxford for a year in her 20s. ‘When I was pitching the book to British editors, they all talked about the surveillance element in a way that American editors didn’t.’

A surveillance culture

For Chan, the neighbour’s call is also an example of how other people can change the course of your life in a moment. She describes a real-life scenario in which a friend forgot her wallet in a shop, parked outside and dashed back in to grab it – leaving her children in the car. ‘She came back to find a woman standing there saying, “I was about to call the police.” And if that woman had called the police, that would have changed the family’s life and invited the government in.’

Two such ‘Good Samaritans’ in the book are Frida’s ex-husband, the gloriously named Gust, and Susanna – a Gwyneth Paltrow-esque woman he had an affair with during Frida’s pregnancy and for whom he ultimately left her.

‘Susanna is one’s worst nightmare of the other woman: she’s younger, she’s tall, she’s gorgeous, she is completely unconflicted about mothering and she embodies wellness culture,’ says Chan. ‘She’s part of parenting culture that’s organic everything, no toxins, wooden toys and cloth diapers – all the things that are technically good, but inaccessible for most people. She gets to be obnoxious in a way that is very entitled and very white. I wove a lot of the things I noticed about mum-blog-land and Instagram into Susanna.’

She describes the couple as ‘wannabe woke people’. ‘Gust and Susanna would post a lot about Black Lives Matter and go to all the marches, but probably have no black friends,’ says Chan. ‘They wouldn’t even understand that their raising of Harriet would be problematic, and might potentially erase her [Asian-American] culture.

‘I’ve met a lot of people in my life who do a lot of social justice goodness, but are not kind to friends and family… So they inadvertently gave me a lot of material for Gust and Susanna, by just being mean over the years.’

Was she worried about offending anyone? Chan pauses.

‘I have been told to look away from the online comments and reviews just for the sake of my mental health. So it’s possible that a whole bunch of people are offended.

‘I also tried to write about race and class in a way that was thoughtful. I definitely had Frida be clued into her own blind spots, and had other characters questioning her privilege. How much can she really know about the experiences of other women of colour? I tried to have the characters put pressure on each other and ask hard questions of each other, rather than pretending that it would be some kind of harmonious kumbaya experience at the school – which I don’t think would be true in any institution.

‘It’s something that I’ve really thought about because my family’s experience of being immigrants in America is very privileged. I have not experienced socio-economic struggles in that way. And so I wanted to be attuned to those differences, rather than just glossing over them.’