PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Matthew Thomas has a BA in English from the University of Chicago, an MA in Fiction from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied under Alice McDermott and Steve Dixon, and an MFA in Fiction from UC-Irvine, where he studied with Geoffrey Wolff and Jim Shephard. He has been working on 'We Are Not Ourselves' more or less exclusively for a decade. Briefly at the end of the last century, he was a reporter for the New York Observer.
'An honest, intimate family story with the power to rock you to your core ... Wrenchingly credible ... Wonderfully wrought ... A rich, sprawling book ... This is one of the frankest novels ever written about love between a caregiver and a person with a degenerative disease ... Thomas spares nothing and still makes it clear how deeply in love these soul mates are ... [It] will reduce anyone who ever had a parent to helpless tears.' Janet Maslin, New York Times 'The greatest Alzheimer's novel yet ... Visionary and challenging ... 'We Are Not Ourselves' exceeds the usual boundaries of fiction on the subject ... At once expansive and tangibly detailed ... Resonant, finely observed ... The truest and most harrowing account of a descent into dementia that I have ever read ... Marvellous.' New Yorker '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 'I was really captivated by the real time decline and endurance in the story. It's a rich and hauntingly scrupulous account of an Irish American family.' Hugo Hamilton 'The mind is a mystery no less than the heart ... Thomas has written a masterwork on both, as well as an anatomy of the American middle class in the 20th Century. It's all here: how we live, how we love, how we die, how we carry on. And Thomas does it with the epic sweep and small pleasures of the very best fiction. It's humbling and heartening to read a book this good.' Joshua Ferris 'This novel is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but ... A true epic in the best sense of the world, encompassing the big great gorgeous heartbreak that was our American Century ... Each page is suffused with a relentless and probing genius, as well as a generous and humane heart, and the result not only explodes across the darkening sky, but remains with you long after you've finished the last page.' Charles Bock
