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Book Buzz: Matthew Thomas debuts on best-seller list

Kelly Lawler
USA TODAY
"We Are Not Ourselves" by Matthew Thomas.

We Are Not Ourselves is a hit with readers as well as critics.

The critically acclaimed novel from first-time author Matthew Thomas lands at No. 32 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list. The book, which follows the daughter of an Irish working-class family in Queens, N.Y., over the course of 60 years, is getting rave reviews across the board.

USA TODAY's Bob Minzesheimer gave it four out of four stars, calling the book "an ambitious, beautifully written novel about ambition and what it can do and not do. It deals with the classic American Dream in all its messy complications ... The writing does not draw attention to itself, but attention should be paid." The New York Times called it a "devastating debut novel," and "an honest, intimate family story with the power to rock you to your core." The Los Angeles Timessaid the story is "unsentimental, multilayered, evocative of a lost world."

Matthew Thomas, author of "We Are Not Ourselves."

Thomas, 38, raised in Queens himself, spent 10 years writing We Are Not Ourselves. The former high school teacher toldThe Guardian that writing the novel profoundly changed him. "I was a fool when I started. I guess now I'm a wise fool in the sense that I know I'm a fool but I didn't know it then. I learned how to be a person over the course of writing this thing."

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