Idiopathy by Sam Byers
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Blurb: A debut novel of love, narcissism, and ailing cattle Idiopathy (jdjÈRpY¸i): a disease or condition which arises spontaneously or for which the cause is unknown. “Idiopathy” a novel as unexpected as its title, in which Katherine, Daniel, and Nathan–three characters you won’t forget in a hurry–unsuccessfully try to figure out how they feel about one another and how they might best live their lives in a world gone mad. Featuring a mysterious cattle epidemic, a humiliating stint in rehab, an unwanted pregnancy, a mom-turned-media personality (“Mother Courage”), and a workplace with a bio-dome housing a perfectly engineered cornfield, it is at once a scathing satire and a moving meditation on love and loneliness. (Fourth Estate, April 2013)
David Annand, The Daily Telegraph
“Brimming with comic brio and nuanced psychological insight, Idiopathy signals the arrival of an exciting new talent. Byers is brilliant at capturing the inadequacies of a generation so conceited that even their attempted altruism is self-serving and insubstantial. ”
Joseph Charlton, The Financial Times
“If [it] sounds too much like standard gloomy social realism, fear not. Though partly an indictment of atomised Britain, Idiopathy – which Byers translates as a “condition which arises spontaneously or for which the cause is unknown” – is laced with satirical verve … Byers saves his best lines for Katherine. The two men act as relative bystanders to the novel’s central action, serving primarily to comment on Katherine’s descent into self-inflicted misery. It works: this is a savagely funny debut from a gifted, cynical new voice.”
Trevor Lewis, The Sunday Times
“Scabrously funny, beadily vigilant and often piercingly perceptive, the author not only mercilessly trains a magnifying glass on broken relationships, but also skilfully refracts his snappy prose in such a way as to burn a hole in his characters’ self-delusions. For all Byers’s observational skills, however, he is far less effective as a satirist.”
Catherine Taylor, The Guardian
“Byers saves the best lines and deepest self-loathing for Katherine, a misanthropist whose allure and self-destructiveness echo that monstrous yet ultimately vulnerable creation, Nicola Six in Martin Amis’s nihilistic London Fields … But her magnificent emptiness is not sustained throughout the novel. Byers makes his characters peak too early, so that the finale – a blackly farcical reunion between the three friends – fizzles rather than fizzes.”
Simon Hammond, The Literary Review
“Well-trodden disappointments dog the characters: their jobs are dreary, their relationships are miserable and they are not getting any younger. Perhaps this is what living in Norfolk is like these days – Byers is a recent UEA graduate – but realistic or not, it doesn’t make for a particularly invigorating novel. ”
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