We Are Not Ourselves (Thomas)

Book Reviews
[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


[T]he story of three generations of an Irish-American family.... Written in calm, polished prose, following one family as its members journey through the decades in an American landscape that is itself in flux, it’s a long, gorgeous epic, full of love and life and caring. It’s even funny, in places—and it’s one of the best novels you’ll read this year.
Maggie Scarf - New York Times Book Review


Stunning....The novel is a formidable tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, to the restorative and ultimately triumphant supremacy of love over life’s adversities....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.
Alice LaPlante - Washington Post


An ambitious, beautifully written novel about ambition and what it can do and not do [that] deals with the classic American Dream in all its messy complications.
USA Today


Astonishing and powerful.... Thomas’s finely observed tale is riveting. As a reflection of American society in the late 20th century, it’s altogether epic, sweeping the reader along on a journey that’s both inexorable and poignant.
People


A great novel about hope, heartbreak, family, and failure in America.
Esquire


(Starred review.) In his powerful and significant debut novel, Thomas masterfully evokes one woman’s life in the context of a brilliantly observed Irish working-class milieu.... Her life...comes close to a definitive portrait of American social dynamics in the 20th century. Thomas’s emotional truthfulness combines with the novel’s texture and scope to create an unforgettable narrative.
Publishers Weekly


An epic tale.... Eileen Tumulty, raised by her immigrant parents in Woodside, NY, in the 1940s and 1950s, is determined not to settle for some boisterous, glad-handing type.... The portrait of a marriage and of a crucial time in American history; great for book clubs.
Library Journal


Thomas' debut opens promisingly with the outsize character of Big Mike Tumulty, an Irish immigrant and bar-stool sage possessed of "a terrible charisma."... Despite its epic size and aspirations, the novel is underpopulated and often underwritten, a quality that does make its richer moments stand out while stoking the appetite for more of those in fewer pages.
Kirkus Reviews