We Are Not Ourselves

Thomas, Matthew

ISBN 10: 000754832X / ISBN 13: 9780007548323

Published by Fourth Estate, 2015

About this Item

A BRAND NEW BOOK UNUSED. Full refund if not satisfied. 24 hour dispatch. If not pictured in this listing, a scan of the actual book is available on request.

Seller Inventory # mac1582

Bibliographic Details

• Title: We Are Not Ourselves
• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 000754832X
• ISBN 13: 9780007548323
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • literature novel

About this title

Synopsis

We Are Not Ourselves [Paperback] Thomas, Matthew

Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, August 2014: Ten years in the making, Matthew Thomas’s heartfelt debut launches with the gritty poetry of a Pete Hamill novel: brash Irishmen on barstools, Irish women both wise and strong, and the streets of New York splayed out like a song. What’s special about this book is how Thomas takes us, slowly and somewhat unexpectedly, deep inside a family battling the gray-toned middling place of their middle-class existence. At the core is Eileen Tumulty Leary, urging her complacent husband and their impressionable son forward. Along the way, lives come and go. (“Fair enough,” her mother said, and in a little while she was dead.) There are some gorgeous scenes, some taut lines (I liked the air-conditioning unit’s “indefatigable wind”), and some heartbreakers (a mother tells her son, at the funeral home, “That’s probably enough”). It’s thrilling to see an emerging writer test and flex his voice. Eileen and her husband are “coconspirators in a mission of normalcy”; in truth, there’s occasionally too much normalcy in these 600 pages. Then again, it’s oddly addictive to watch this family unfold, age, and devolve. Intimate, honest, and true, it’s the story of a doomed father and a flawed son and the indefatigable and loving woman who keeps them all together, even as they’re falling apart. --Neal Thompson