Will There Ever Be Another You: A Novel

by Patricia Lockwood

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Will There Ever Be Another You tells the story of one woman’s unraveling during a global pandemic. Gripping and disconcerting, this is perfect for fans of Melissa Broder and Ottessa Moshfegh.

From the Booker Prize finalist and “formidably gifted writer” (The New York Times), a vertiginous novel about a woman’s descent into illness and insanity.

Amid a global pandemic, one young woman is trying to keep the pieces together – of her family, stunned by a devastating loss, and of her mind, left mangled and misfiring from a mystifying disease. She’s afraid of her own floorboards, and “WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON’T HURT ME” plays over and over in her ears. She hates her friends, or more accurately, she doesn’t know who they are.

Has the illness stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Does it mean she’ll get to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people? The very weave of herself seems to have loosened: time and memories pass straight through her body. “I’m sorry not to respond to your email,” she writes, “but I live completely in the present now."

Will There Ever Be Another You is the brain-shredding, phosphorescent story of one woman’s dissolution and her attempt to create a new way of thinking, as well as a profound investigation into what keeps us alive in times of unprecedented disorientation and loss, from one of our most original writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798217168972
Publisher:	Diversified Publishing
Publication date:	09/23/2025
Edition description:	Large Print
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Patricia Lockwood is the bestselling author of the Booker Prize finalist and Dylan Thomas Prize-winning novel No One Is Talking About This, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2021 by The New York Times Book Review and one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the past 100 years. Her other books include the memoir Priestdaddy, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review as well as two poetry collections. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2025-05-30
In the wake of a disorienting illness, a woman attempts to write “a masterpiece about being confused.”

What on earth is happening to the unnamed protagonist of this novel? She suffers from “bizarre nonsense dreams,” feels there is “a secret number between two and three,” and sees “a zigzag” in the corner of her eye that she refers to as “the angel.” Has an unnamed illness “stolen her old mind and given her a new one?” We’re told she “first got sick” in March 2020, and because the details of the protagonist’s life and work track so closely with the author’s, we assume it is Covid-19, which left Lockwood in a post-Covid fog, described in an essay for theLondon Review of Books. This is no straightforward illness diary, but a “mad notebook” capturing the sensory experience and psychic state of a character in extremis. It opens with a family trip to Scotland, seemingly before the pandemic—but never mind, linearity and narrative are beside the point. In Scotland, the protagonist suddenly believes in fairies; throughout the book she is obsessed with changelings, doppelgängers, knockoff Cabbage Patch Kids, cloned sheep,Mrs. Doubtfire, a potential TV adaptation of her memoir,Priestdaddy, and all manner of facsimiles that point toward the existential question of the title. Somewhat incidentally, she reads and feverishly analyzesAnna Karenina, tries her hand at metalworking, and, after her husband undergoes emergency surgery that leaves him with 36 staples in the abdomen, finds herself “in charge of the Wound.” Wherever this phantasmagoric book takes us, it is shot through with a poet’s love for the slippery absurdities of language and abundant laugh-out-loud gags. Can we hope for a one-woman show?

There is only one Patricia Lockwood, and this surreal, silly, and sneakily profound book could only be hers.

Kirkus Reviews