Finalist for the Booker Prize
Finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction
Finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize

Named a Best Book of 2021 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, TIME, Vulture, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, PopSugar, Harper's Bazaar, LitHub and Publishers Weekly

“One of the most incisive observers of the spectacle of digital discourse . . . Lockwood is a sharp and often funny social critic. She writes wisely of the emotionally labile landscape of the internet . . . many of her images are evocative and often beautiful . . . More inventive than lapidary, Ms. Lockwood’s style is artful without being precious . . . 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.” —Emily Bobrow, The Wall Street Journal

“Lockwood is sending a bulletin from the future . . . [She] has set out to portray not merely a mind through language, as Joyce did, but what she calls ‘the mind,’ the molting collective consciousness that has melded with her protagonist’s singular one . . . Lockwood gets it right, mimicking the medium while shrewdly parodying its ethos . . . God, is she funny! . . . Lockwood’s conceit is smart, her prose original, hugely entertaining and witty . . . a powerful, paradoxical observation about what digital platforms take from us . . . Lockwood’s own writing takes on new depth and a more focussed, richer beauty as her protagonist gets farther from the portal and deeper into the tangible present . . . Lockwood’s writing grows radiant . . . it is a story, simply, about love, selfless and delighted.” —Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker

“[An] attention-grabbing mind-blower which toggles between irony and sincerity, sweetness and blight . . . surprisingly beautiful . . . Lockwood is a master of sweeping, eminently quotable proclamations that fearlessly aim to encapsulate whole movements and eras . . . It's a testament to her skills as a rare writer who can navigate both sleaze and cheese, jokey tweets and surprising earnestness, that we not only buy her character's emotional epiphany but are moved by it. Of course, people will be talking about this meaty book, and about the questions Lockwood raises about what a human being is, what a brain is, and most important, what really matters.” —NPR