Anybody with an interest in technology and its implementation who hasn't yet read Francis Spufford's The Backroom Boys has a huge treat in store. It's an account of the engineers who created leading British technologies – for example, the origins of mobile telephony and the creation of Vodafone in the activities of the men who drove around the country in vans mapping the transmission of radio waves. The book captures the passion, the sheer love of technology, which drove the innovators. It's also a nostalgic work as the tales illustrate present failings in recounting past glories. What did happen to the proud tradition of British engineering? Although the UK does have some thriving technology businesses now, engineering and technology don't have that central role in the economy and our sense of ourselves as a nation as was the case a generation or two ago.

This is by way of a trailer for Francis Spufford's new book, Red Plenty, which will be published by Faber in August. I'll review it closer to launch date. All I will say for now is that it will be another must-read. Here is a book about central planning which is a gripping page-turner, one I polished off in two sittings, staying up late into the night to finish. It's set in the Soviet Union of the 1960s, the years when Kruschev liberalized the country a little, and when – briefly – it seemed that planned economies were more successful than capitalist ones. The book explores how the system operated and why ultimately it failed, and describes the experiment in applying linear planning on the scale of the whole economy.

A page turner? Yes indeed. The publisher clearly expected a work of non-fiction – that's how it's billed in the Faber catalogue. Equally clearly, the book isn't what they expected, and that surprise is reflected in the blurb. In reality this is a superb novel of ideas, peopled by vivid characters, moving, wonderfully written. It's a timely exploration, now so many people have gone of the idea of markets, of why the alternative is worse. I think the publisher should re-categorize it and enter it at once for the fiction prizes.

The power of Spufford's imagination is a magic carpet taking us back to an era that – although now ancient history and remote from everyday memory – made my childhood nightmares dark dreams of nuclear holocaust. I shall give it to my 19-year old son: studying politics and economics; it will bring home to him the human truth of the ideological battle between communism and capitalism.