Matthew Thomas (http://www.matthewthomasauthor.com/) was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens. He lives with his wife and twin children in New Jersey. 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, where he received the Graduate Essay Award. This novel was shortlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award.
The summary of We Are Not Ourselves is as follows. 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 whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed. When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit. They marry, and Eileen quickly discovers Ed doesn’t aspire to the same, ever bigger, stakes in the American Dream.
Eileen encourages her husband to want more: a better job, better friends, a better house, but as years pass it becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper 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. Will they realise that life is more than a tally of victories and defeats, that we live to love and be loved, and that we should tell each other so before the moment slips away? Read this accomplished novel to find out.
Enquire at your local library. Check if this notable fiction is in stock by consulting the online catalogue at Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk).
Further bibliographic detail here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Are-Not-Ourselves-Matthew-Thomas/dp/0007548214/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418838082&sr=1-1&keywords=we+are+not+ourselves
640 pages in Simon & Schuster
First published 2014
ISBN 978-1476756677
Matthew Thomas