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No One Is Talking About This (Hardback)
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No One Is Talking About This (Hardback)

(author)
£14.99
Hardback 224 Pages
Published: 16/02/2021
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Waterstones Says

A powerful meditation on the value of human connection, poet Patricia Lockwood’s mordantly funny debut novel explores the pitfalls of social media in an entirely original fashion.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021.

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021

A woman known for her viral social media posts travels the world speaking to her adoring fans, her entire existence overwhelmed by the internet - or what she terms 'the portal'.

Are we in hell? the people of the portal ask themselves. Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?

Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: 'Something has gone wrong,' and 'How soon can you get here?'

As real life and its stakes collide with the increasing absurdity of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

Irreverent and sincere, poignant and delightfully profane, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the infinite scroll and a meditation on love, language and human connection from one of the most original voices of our time.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 9781526629760
Number of pages: 224
Weight: 354 g
Dimensions: 216 x 135 mm


MEDIA REVIEWS

Astonishing and wholly original . . . Patricia Lockwood is the voice of a generation of new writers who grew up under the constant pressures of real-time news and social media - Namita Gokhale, Chair judge for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2022

No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood is a rare wonder. The author is razor-sharp as she takes us through the absurdities of internet living, but when the narrative shifts in the second half, and her family reel from personal tragedy, I was left in bits - Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize-winning author of SHUGGIE BAIN

I have been in headlong love with Patricia Lockwood’s hilarious and subversive mind since her memoir Priestdaddy, but her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, sent me reeling. Everything about this book is testament to her wicked genius - Lauren Groff, Red Magazine, Books of the Year 2021

I finally read No One Is Talking About This after everyone recommending it to me all year, and I'm so, so happy I did. Please, please read this book - Lorde

Lockwood is an incontrovertibly gifted writer. Her sentences are routinely surprising, her voice a startling agglomeration of poetic clarity and hectic comedy - Guardian

Often filthy and irreverent, sometimes extremely funny, and ultimately surprisingly poignant, No One Is Talking About This offers more proof of Lockwood’s particular genius - Telegraph

A work that feels intensely relevant to our fractured time . . . Wonderfully intricate - Independent

Lockwood has paid attention more closely than perhaps any other human on earth to what it’s like to be alive right now - Vanity Fair

Astonishing . . . No One Is Talking About This will frighten you, implicate you, and scrape your guts out, in the best way possible - Esquire

Lockwood’s conceit is smart, her prose original, hugely entertaining and witty . . . It is a story, simply, about love, selfless and delighted - New Yorker

A smart and sharp book that is both addictive and deeply unsettling - Sarah Hughes, i

What begins as an ironical story about irony becomes an intimate and moving portrait of love and grief. In this way, a novel that had been toying with the digital surface of modern life finds the tender heart pumping away beneath it all - Wall Street Journal

Reading Patricia Lockwood feels like looking through a kaleidoscope built by a mischievous sorcerer — the world is suddenly rearranged in fragments that are cosmic, wondrous, humiliating, and profane. No One Is Talking About This is a furiously original novel, alive and unstable; the book builds to a reminder of how devastation and connection produce each other, endlessly and surprisingly, both on the internet and in human places that our shared digital consciousness can never reach - Jia Tolentino

Lockwood is a phenomenal writer who is a keen observer of . . . the fragility of the human heart - Roxane Gay

Hilarious, affectionate and deeply-felt. There is nothing that Lockwood – and I don't say this lightly – can’t do - Nicole Flattery, author of SHOW THEM A GOOD TIME

A delightfully weird look at our service to the internet (fitting in a year that gave us the “doomscroll”) and human connection and intersection - Stylist

A formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases - New York Times Book Review

The first half is a series of unbelievably accurate and funny and insightful takes on what it means to live in the internet of the modern age, and the second half swivels and becomes a kind of personal, family dynamic … It moved me to tears - Elizabeth Day

The poet and essayist turns her hand to fiction in this fragmentary tale that addresses urgent questions about the absurdity of the digital world - Harper's Bazaar

An eagerly awaited novel . . . about a woman whose life is overwhelmed by the internet - The Times

Set to be one of 2021’s biggest books . . . riveting - Daily Mail

I really admire and love this book. Patricia Lockwood is a completely singular talent and this is her best, funniest, weirdest, most affecting work yet - Sally Rooney

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“Confusing and irritating”

I was looking forward to reading this book which sounded quirky and original. It was both, but I also found it confusing and at times just as if the author had written a string of words for no particular reason. From... More

Hardback edition
Helpful? Upvote 44

“A great novel for the internet age”

I attended Patricia Lockwood's lecture at the British Museum for the LRB last year, which is both referred to as an event in the book and the contents of the talk make up a good section of the first half. It was... More

Hardback edition
Helpful? Upvote 42

“Surprising and brilliant”

Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This was one of those books I expected to be clever, witty and quotable. It is all of those things and also heartbreaking. I certainly didn't expect to be sobbing... More

Hardback edition
Helpful? Upvote 34

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