Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Bellevue Literary Press (2019), Edition: Anniversary, 208 pages
Description
On his deathbed, surrounded by his family, George Washington Crosby's thoughts drift back to his childhood and the father who abandoned him when he was twelve.
Media reviews
"There are few perfect debut American novels. Walter Percy's The Moviegoer and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird come to mind. So does Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. To this list ought to be added Paul Harding's devastating first book, Tinkers, the story of a dying man drifting back in time to
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his hardscrabble New England childhood, growing up the son of his clock-making father. Harding has written a masterpiece around the truism that all of us, even surrounded by family, die alone." Show Less
The occasional overwriting, the looping narrative, and the almost defiant lack of plot made this a hard book to sell to publishers. An array of editors at major houses rejected the novel, no doubt afraid it would never sell. It apparently sat for several years in the writer's desk. Then an obscure
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house, the Bellevue Literary Press, published it to such little fanfare that the New York Times (like most papers) ignored it completely. Then, miracle of miracles, it won the Pulitzer. Show Less
Among the many triumphs of this novel, Harding enables a reader to look at the world differently, without the things that normally encumber experience. Tinkers is a considerable achievement.
Its prose is complex, sometimes convoluted, but at its best suffused with brilliantly realised imagery and a reminder of how rich the written language can still be.
"In Paul Harding's stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for: a new way of seeing, in a story told as a series of ruminative images, like a fanned card deck."
In Harding’s skillful evocation, Crosby’s life, seen from its final moments, becomes a mosaic of memories, “showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment.”
Tinkers is a novel rich in close observation, short in dialogue and event. While normally this would be a cloying combination, the sharp richness of Harding's language and the precision of his descriptions makes the novel both transfixing and compelling.
Awards
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2011)
Pulitzer Prize (Winner — Fiction — 2010)
LA Times Book Prize (Finalist — 2009)
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize (Finalist — 2010)
Center for Fiction First Novel Prize (Shortlist — 2009)
Prix Maurice-Edgar Coindreau (2012)
Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year (Fiction — 2009)
San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year (Fiction — 2009)
Christian Science Monitor Best Book (Fiction — 2010)
Notable Books List (Fiction — 2010)
Globe and Mail Top 100 Book (2010)
Language
Original publication date
2009-01-01
Physical description
208 p.; 7 inches
ISBN
1942658605 / 9781942658603
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LCC
PS3608.A72535 T56