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No One Is Talking About This

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021 and the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021

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No One Is Talking About This

By: Patricia Lockwood
Narrated by: Kristen Sieh
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Bloomsbury presents No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, read by Kristen Sieh.

‘A masterpiece’ Guardian
‘I really admire and love this book’ Sally Rooney
‘An intellectual and emotional rollercoaster’ Daily Mail
‘I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book’ David Sedaris
‘It moved me to tears’ Elizabeth Day


THE ONLY BOOK SHORTLISTED FOR BOTH THE BOOKER PRIZE AND THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2021
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This is a story about a life lived in two halves.

It’s about what happens when real life collides with the increasing absurdity of a world accessed through a screen.

It’s about living in world that contains both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.

It's a meditation on love, language and human connection from one of the most original voices of our time.

______________________________________________

‘An utterly distinctive mixture of depth, dazzling linguistic richness, anarchic wit and raw emotional candour’ Rowan Williams

A 2021 Book of the Year: Sunday Times, Guardian, Daily Mail, Telegraph, Evening Standard, The Times, New Statesman, Red, Observer, Independent, Daily Telegraph©2021 Patricia Lockwood (P)2021 Penguin Random House LLC Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Political Women's Fiction Heartfelt Witty Tear-jerking Thought-Provoking
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Critic 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
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
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
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
A work that feels intensely relevant to our fractured time . . . Wonderfully intricate
Lockwood has paid attention more closely than perhaps any other human on earth to what it’s like to be alive right now
Astonishing . . . No One Is Talking About This will frighten you, implicate you, and scrape your guts out, in the best way possible
Lockwood’s conceit is smart, her prose original, hugely entertaining and witty . . . It is a story, simply, about love, selfless and delighted
A smart and sharp book that is both addictive and deeply unsettling
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
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
All stars
Most relevant
The first part was a struggle. Very chaotic. I didin't get all those irritating and worthless thoughts. So unnecessary in normal life. The second part was very emotional.

Chaotic

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I think people struggle with this as its style is quite fragmentary and disjointed - but reflecting the fragmentary nature of writing in the internet (herein nicknamed ‘The Portal’), it captures something desperate and urgent about the narrator’s grapple with the personal and real, versus the synthetic and ephemeral world of the Portal in which she has carved a career, and an identity.

The vulgarity of some of the descriptions in the first half are necessary to establish the harsh, brazen world of extremes and binaries in the internet world, which contrasts with the complexity of the real world - the subtleties of the delicate personal grief which unfolds in the second half, overlaid with bittersweet joy of a tiny new life.

I cried at the end in the acknowledgements.

Even if it’s not your cup of tea, give it a chance

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This is very very very well read. And written. I’m going to listen again. Now

Writing. Reading. Everything

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I remember reading James Joyce’s “Ulysses” at university and being utterly baffled by the cacophony of references - snatches of popular songs, references to current affairs, advertising slogans etc. - and being told by the lecturer that if we’d read it in 1922, we would have “got it”. Now, in 2021, reading “No One is Talking About This” I think I know what they meant. I come from the same generation as Lockwood and recognize many of the allusions and references embedded in the stream of this novel’s consciousness. It is immensely satisfying. And the second part is as beautiful and heartbreaking as the first part is dazzling.

The (very much shorter) Ulysses of our time

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This book looks at our relationship with the Internet and where it might lead. Then how one moment can change everything and this can teach us to appreciate every minute in the physical world as well.

A beautifully written poetic novel. Perfect for these pandemic times to remind us as we emerge blinking in the sunlight to appreciate real relationships as well as virtual ones.

A lyrical book about love, life and the portal

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