Shelf Awareness

In Act 2 of King Lear, the king is talking to the Earl of Gloucester, saying infirmity affects all of us, high and low: "We are not ourselves/ When nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind/ To suffer with the body." This is one of the epigraphs Matthew Thomas chooses to set the stage for his magnificent first novel, We Are Not Ourselves. What can mental illness do to a person? How do others deal with it? These are important questions that this enormous book, in size and depth, asks. It's also a masterful portrait of a mother and wife, Eileen, in all her strengths and weaknesses...