A father takes his three-year-old to IKEA on a quick errand. Neither of them makes it home.

What begins as an ordinary Tuesday errand, Alvar M. Inguson herding his daughter Una Stella past the Småland play area and down the self-service aisles, curdles by nightfall into something else entirely. Distracted by a football match on his phone, Alvar misses closing time, and father and daughter are locked in overnight. At first the change is barely noticeable. But soon the ceiling sits higher than it did the day before, the crowd speaks a dozen languages, and the arrows on the floor no longer seem to lead to any exit. Staff offer only the same calm reassurance: keep walking the path.

Helgason, best known internationally for 101 Reykjavík and the Sixty Kilo Saga, turns the world’s most familiar retail experience into a corridor with no end. It is a modern odyssey through consumption, surveillance and the small print we all agree to without reading. Helgason himself calls it an indoor version of The Road, with the IKEA path in place of the empty American highway.

Funny, sinister and disarmingly tender, it is a book about what we sign away and what we lose when a system stops explaining itself.