Idiopathy – Sam Byers

‘The thought of going through it all again, all that love stuff . . .’Katherine has given up trying to be happy. Thirty, reeling from her break-up with the ever-sensible Daniel, and stuck in a job and a town she hates, her mounting cynicism and vicious wit repel the people she wants to attract, and attract the people she knows she should repel. Daniel, meanwhile, isn’t sure that he loves his new girlfriend Angelica. But somehow not telling her he loves her has become synonymous with telling her that he doesn’t love her, meaning that he has to tell her he loves her just to maintain the status quo.When their former friend Nathan returns from a stint in a psychiatric ward to find that his mother has transformed herself into bestselling author “Mother Courage”, with thousands of Twitter followers and a website, Katherine, Daniel and Nathan decide to meet to heal old wounds and reaffirm their friendship. But is revisiting the past a good idea? Almost certainly not.Written with dazzling flair and deep insight; veering from scathing satire to a moving account of love and loneliness, Idiopathyneatly skewers the tangled relationships and unhinged narcissism of a self-obsessed generation. Taking aim at hippie protests, money-grabbing misery memoirs, self-help quackery and an increasingly bizarre cattle epidemic, it announces the arrival of a formidable, savagely funny talent.