“A deeply admirable achievement, a novel that sets out to do something incredibly risky and sees it through, diving deep into the foetid swamp and breaking through to the other side… Come Join Our Disease is so bold and interesting that I can imagine it becoming a cult classic, but even saying this dismisses it to the realms of something trendy and niche. Byers's mastery of tone and attentiveness to every psychological shift confirms him as one of the most accomplished novelists of his generation. The world he creates is so fully realised that anything you read afterwards feels a bit half-hearted. Less than 20 pages from the end a meditation on human disintegration - and the love that can arise from sharing in one another's decay - moved me to tears. It felt piercingly wise and, dare I say it, beautiful.” ― Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times

“Disturbingly exceptional... drives a singular tunnel to the heart of what it means to be a human… [Maya] blazes with all the anger of Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist… Her very refusal to buy into any process or progress makes for a demanding read, but it is absolutely convincing.” — The Observer

“Writing in the tradition of JG Ballard, Tom McCarthy and Dave Eggers, Byers scrutinises the distortions of a digital age in which the concept of freedom has been diminished by social media… Byers’ sharply focused prose imbues even the everyday with a hyper-real quality, everything ‘throbbing at life’s unique frequency’, and he revels in the Swiftian grotesque, describing putrefaction with an almost mystical grandeur… Come Join Our Disease is a blistering critique of 21st Century life. By turns unnerving, disgusting and enthralling, the novel exposes the limits of radicalism, and the alienation inevitable in a society where even altruism has become a commodity.” — The Financial Times

“A remarkable spectacle… relentless… an unforgettable novel.” — The Times Literary Supplement

“A feminist Lord of the Flies for the wellness era.” — Metro

“Politically astute, endlessly quotable and highly visual… the guy can write, is one smart cookie, and Come Join Our Disease is quite outstanding.” — The Irish Times

“Not since Timothy Mo’s Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard, I think, has there been a mainstream literary novel so fiercely and lovingly committed to the feculent: whole paragraphs and pages are dedicated to mucous, vomit, slicks of warm diarrhoea, puddles of piss, maggoty sores and liquefying rotten meat… Byers is a keen and effective stylist, and he’s superbly astute about the complex shifts and negotiations between his characters…amid the lurid colour and the grand theoretical gestures is a poignant story of friendship and isolation, of human connections made and lost. There’s something interesting growing in all that filth.” — The Guardian

“Byers is one of Britain’s premier satirists, a sharp-eyed chronicler of the country’s peculiarly tawdry national malaise.” — The Quietus

From the author of Perfidious Albion, a darkly comic and profoundly affecting novel about resistance, radicalism and redemption.

Maya is homeless and living on an illegal encampment in London. The site is razed and Maya is detained, but then she learns that she has been chosen for a shot at redemption. She is offered a chance to be rehabilitated into society; to be given a job, a flat and an allowance - and to be become a polished, successful member of society. But she must document her progress on Instagram so that the tech company that is sponsoring her can gain corporate philanthropy points.

Trapped in a cycle of numbing work and mindless self-improvement, Maya begins to understand why alienation from society results from a culture of being 'perfect'. Feeling feverishly ill after a weekend detox retreat, she realises that sickness is an escape from unattainable ideals. With Zelma, an unemployed woman who she meets at the doctor's, Maya begins to resist; first by defacing adverts that promote impossible wellness, and then subverting her Instagram account into one of images of her own filth and defecation.

Once again excluded from productive society, Maya finds liberation in an alternative community of women who celebrate a lifestyle of debauchery, unchecked consumption, ugliness, illness and decay. But conflict within the group builds, and controversy grows outside, and Maya is caught by the forces she has unleashed: liberation and madness, protest and anarchy, rebellion and chaos. Come Join Our Disease is a book about freedom, and how much of it any of us can truly withstand.