We Are Not Ourselves - Hardcover

Thomas, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 147675666X ISBN 13: 9781476756660

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2014

Synopsis

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2014 * Washington Post Top 50 Fiction List for 2014 * Entertainment Weekly Ten Best Fiction Books of 2014 * Esquire 5 Most Important Books of 2014 * Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2014 * One of Janet Maslin’s Ten Favorite Books of the Year in The New York Times

The instant New York Times bestseller the Washington Post calls a “stunning...superbly rendered” novel, and Entertainment Weekly describes as “a gripping family saga, maybe the best...since The Corrections.”

Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on how much alcohol has been consumed. From an early age, Eileen wished that she lived somewhere else. She sets her sights on upper class Bronxville, New York, and an American Dream is born.

Driven by this longing, Eileen places her stock and love in Ed Leary, a handsome young scientist, and with him begins a family. Over the years Eileen encourages her husband to want more: a better job, better friends, a better house. It slowly becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper, more incomprehensive psychological shift. An inescapable darkness enters their lives, and Eileen and Ed and their son Connell try desperately to hold together a semblance of the reality they have known, and to preserve, against long odds, an idea they have cherished of the future.

Described by The New York Times Book Review as “A long, gorgeous epic, full of love and caring...one of the best novels you’ll read this year,” We Are Not Ourselves is a testament to our greatest desires and our greatest frailties. Through the lives of these characters, Thomas charts the story of the American Century. The result is, “stunning...The joys of this book are the joys of any classic work of literature—for that is what this is destined to become—superbly rendered small moments that capture both an individual life and the universality of that person’s experience” (The Washington Post).

About this title

Review:

"[A] masterly debut."
--"Vanity Fair"

""The Corrections." "The Art of Fielding." Most years, there's a mega-hyped American epic that's heralded as a literary breakout. This year's, a saga about an Irish-American family in Queens, is refreshingly unpretentious but packed with soul--and profoundly moving characters." --"Entertainment Weekly," The Must List
"A stunning, stunning book...Possibly the most engaged I've been with any book this year."
--Phil Klay, "Year in Reading" on TheMillions.com

"The greatest Alzheimer's novel yet..."We Are Not Ourselves" exceeds the usual boundaries of fiction on the subject."
--Stefan Merril Block, NewYorker.com

""We Are Not Ourselves" is a powerfully moving book, and the figure of Eileen Leary mother, wife, daughter, lover, nurse, caretaker, whiskey drinker, upwardly mobile dreamer, retrenched protector of values is a real addition to our literature.
Chad Harbach, author of "The Art of Fielding""

""We Are Not Ourselves" is wonderful on the position of the striving classes and our longings on behalf of our families, and on how we deal with unexpected disaster. It s as fiercely passionate and big-hearted and memorable as Eileen, its I m-holding-this-family-together-with-my-two-hands protagonist."
Jim Shepard, author of "Project X" and "You Think That s Bad""

[A] masterly debut.
"Vanity Fair""

"The Corrections." "The Art of Fielding." Most years, there s a mega-hyped American epic that s heralded as a literary breakout. This year s, a saga about an Irish-American family in Queens, is refreshingly unpretentious but packed with soul and profoundly moving characters. "Entertainment Weekly," The Must List"

A gripping family saga, maybe the best I've read since "The Corrections."
Melissa Maerz, "Entertainment Weekly," Grade: A"

[A] devastating debut novel . . . an honest, intimate family story with the power to rock you to your core . . . [a] wrenchingly credible main character . . . rich, sprawling . . . Mr. Thomas s narrow scope (despite a highly eventful story) and bull s-eye instincts into his Irish characters fear, courage and bluster bring to mind the much more compressed style of Alice McDermott . . . Part of what makes "We Are Not Ourselves" so gripping is the credible yet surprising ways in which it reveals the details of any neuroscientist s worst nightmare . . . This is a book in which a hundred fast-moving pages feel like a lifetime and everything looks different in retrospect. As in the real world, the reader s point of view must change as often as those of the characters . . . This is one of the frankest novels ever written about love between a caregiver and a person with a degenerative disease. The great French film Amour conveyed the emotional aspects of such a relationship, but Mr. Thomas spares nothing and still makes it clear how deeply in love these soul mates are. Janet Maslin, "New York Times""

About the Author:

Matthew Thomas was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he has an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. His New York Times-bestselling novel We Are Not Ourselves has been shortlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. He lives with his wife and twin children in New Jersey.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 147675666X
• ISBN 13: 9781476756660
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 620