style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">Sam Byers has a taste for banality and interior design. Idiopathy, his debut novel, is a story of suburban paralysis set in Norwich, in eastern England. It offers us an account of middle-class paraphern­alia: vegetable juicers, scatter cushions, bathrooms decorated with off-white linoleum and “the pointless horseshoe of carpet round the toilet”.