None of This Is Serious: Catherine Prasifka

Product Information

Dublin student life is ending for Sophie and her friends. They've got everything figured out, and Sophie feels left behind as they all start to go their separate ways. She’s overshadowed by her best friend Grace. She’s been in love with Finn for as long as she’s known him. And she’s about to meet Rory, who’s suddenly available to her online.At a party, what was already unstable completely falls apart and Sophie finds herself obsessively scrolling social media, waiting for something (anything) to happen. of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars None of This Is Serious by Catherine Prasifka I could totally relate to Sally Rooney’s protagonists even though I am a couple of years older. It was much harder for me to sympathise with Sophie as she is much too passive and has made herself comfortable in lamenting her situation without doing something against it. Her best friend accuses her of being selfish and arrogant, an opinion I would agree with. She is too self-involved to notice others and pathetically cries over and over again. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)

None of This Is Serious by Catherine Prasifka | Goodreads None of This Is Serious by Catherine Prasifka | Goodreads

In None of this is Serious we meet Sophie. A 22-year-old University graduate who is job hunting, living at home with her parents in Dublin, feels more at ease in the cyber world than the real one and is more than a little lost. She spends an inordinate amount of time online – she has a true addiction: A sharp and addictive modern debut set in Dublin, about female friendship and our obsession with being online I started reading None of This is Serious the morning after a night out and the hangxiety was real. This book was not only the perfect distraction – I literally couldn’t stop reading it, but it turned out that it was pretty fitting too for my hungover feeling right then.

Featured Reviews

In an interesting narrative technique, Prasifka uses speech marks for other characters but Sophie’s dialogue is integrated into the text, such that in her first-person telling we sometimes don’t know if she is speaking or thinking. Edgy . . . [Prasifka] has a painfully raw and acute gift for catching the way things are"— Sunday Times I need him, like this, right now. The problem is I can't need him any more. I don't want to stop being with him, but I can't be with him.”

None of This Is Serious by Catherine Prasifka - Fantastic Fiction

I adored this book. Sophie is an utterly relatable protagonist for anyone who’s ever found themselves in the grip of existential crisis or overwhelmed with anxiety and powerlessness about the big issues of our time. It also covered our modern obsession with social media and the online world. Sundays are all about books and coffee, who's with me? The Archives The Archives Search by Category We're delighted to present an extract from None of this is Serious, the debut novel by Catherine Prasifka, published by Canongate. I refresh the feed every minute and continue to consume, growing fat. I’m like a vampire, leeching off the content of other people’s lives.

Advance Praise

None of This Is Serious is brilliant – so devastatingly precise about being a young woman living in Ireland and online today, moving deftly between sharp, hilarious observations and heartbreaking, enraging moments’ After a minute, Grace opens the door, a drink in her hand. Noise from the party pours out. I don’t recognise the song. Multicoloured balloons roam free-range on the floor. People are dancing in the kitchen beyond the hall, some of them well. It all washes over me.

None of this is Serious | Catherine Prasifka - NetGalley None of this is Serious | Catherine Prasifka - NetGalley

In the second half of the book I was so livid and heartbroken for Sophie. There is a sexual abuse storyline that really captures the anger of so many discussions I’ve had with my friends. I flit between social bubbles, each one with a slightly different rhythm. The girls I know from school are the same as always, each personality moving against the others in a well-practised dance. They welcome me into their group, but I have nothing to say to them. Niamh asks me, ‘What are you up to now?’ as though we’ve not spoken in months, and I remember that we haven’t. I wonder at what point I became an outsider and if it’s their fault or mine. They don’t try to convince me to stay when I stand up and mumble an excuse; they are too engrossed in each other’s lives. Balancing visions of the apocalypse with a Gen-Z everywoman’s daily grind, None of This is Serious is an astute portrayal of how the minutiae of our personal lives inevitably loom larger than global issues. I know, I know. It sounds like something we have heard before but this book offers so much more. The writing is so intimate from the first line to the very last. The book will dive the reader right into Sophie's mind, only seeing everything she is seeing and feeling everything she is feeling. We are not just seeing through her perspective, we are in her perspective. I have some criticisms about this book, but ultimately every single one of them can be rebuffed by the fact that we are seeing through this young woman's eyes. The decisions she made, the actions she took, the dread she felt—all of it just made her more real than many characters you will come across.An extraordinary novel. None of This Is Serious brilliantly explores the impossibility to "come of age" in end times, where screens are so contiguous to experience that no-one is ever truly online or offline. She writes truthfully and with affectless nuance about the labyrinthine workings of friend groups and the defences women scramble for in a world that still hates us." - Naoise Dolan

None of this is Serious by Catherine Prasifka - read an extract None of this is Serious by Catherine Prasifka - read an extract

While the existential angst of young people may seem like well-trodden ground, Prasifka puts her own spin on it, and what begins as a coming-of-age story with a love triangle grows into a more sophisticated reflection on our times. She is an astute observer of the social dynamics of her generation: “The conversation breaks down into an argument that no one really wants to have, where everyone’s arguing the same side, as is our custom.” At a party, what was already unstable completely falls apart and Sophie finds herself obsessively scrolling social media, waiting for something (anything) to happen.These include Snowflake by Louise Nealon, Eggshells by Caitriona Lally and The Beauty of Impossible Thingsby Rachel Donohue. The latter also has a reference to a strange phenomenon in the sky. Sophie is a recent university grad living at home and trying to figure out what comes next. Her friends, many of whom are moving abroad, seem to have it all worked out, as does Hannah, her high-achieving twin sister. Sophie, meanwhile, spends her days blasting out her CV, doom-scrolling and texting two men; her nights out often end in binge drinking. If you say so, but I think you should drink again,’ Dan teases me. He always teases me; it’s part of how he shows affection. An extraordinary novel. None of This Is Serious brilliantly explores the impossibility to "come of age" in end times, where screens are so contiguous to experience that no-one is ever truly online or offline. She writes truthfully and with affectless nuance about the labyrinthine workings of friend groups and the defences women scramble for in a world that still hates us’