The Guardian | The Observer: Interview

"Life isn't fair, awful things happen to blameless people, but then sometimes, just occasionally, the universe seems to get it right. Matthew Thomas, a 38-year-old former high-school teacher, is the sort of gentle, diligent and thoughtful human for whom you wish nothing less than, well, a million-dollar book deal. A reward he won after spending a decade of his life writing We Are Not Ourselves, his first novel, which tells the life story of Eileen, an Irish-American woman born in 1941, as well as the lives of her husband, Ed, and son, Connell. The name "Jonathan Franzen" has been invoked by those rushing to praise the book. It's an epic tale of family life written in the most un-epic of circumstances." Continue reading...