Book of the week: We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins

Patricia Lockwood is a young American poet and memoirist whose elegantly witty tweets – “@ParisReview So is Paris any good or not” – have earned her the moniker “poet laureate of Twitter”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in the New Statesman. Now she has produced the “best novel I have read about the internet”. In its first half, we are taken “inside the head” of a woman who leads a very online existence: she posts incessantly on the “portal” (the novel’s word for the internet), and travels the world speaking about digital culture. But half way through, she is “wrenched out” of this by the news that her sister’s baby has a rare congenital condition. This turns what might have become an “in-joke for media liberals” into a deeper story.

To me, this irruption of real-life tragedy felt like a “sentimental device”, said Sarah Ditum in The Times. The baby is a “visitation from a wiser sphere”, who “fortuitously resets the narrator’s dysfunctional relationship with the internet”. It’s a bit contrived. The book is strongest when it focuses on Lockwood’s home territory: the “studied vacuity” of the “portal”.

Bloomsbury Circus 224pp £14.99; The Week Bookshop £11.99

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Week Bookshop

To order this title or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm.