Tinkers

Description

WINNER OF THE 2010 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris- newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure. A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost seven decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring. Heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

Paul Harding has an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (2000) and was a 2000-2001 Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, MA. He has published short stories in Shakepainter and The Harvard Review. Paul currently teaches creative writing at Harvard. Tinkers is his first novel.

Wonderful, lyrical . . . Triumphant . . . A beautiful, moving and elegiac lament on the human condition . . . Hypnotic. * The Times * Brilliantly realised . . . a reminder of how rich the written language can still be * Independent * Prepare to be seduced... Beguiles from the opening sentence ...This little novel is a wonder * Irish Times * An expert piece of historical and psychological archaeology, which unpicks the intricacies of ordinary life while also asking the terrifying, unanswerable, yet endlessly fascinating questions that haunt us all * Observer * A dense, elegiac and richly imagined piece of remembering...Life-affirming and visceral in its detail. * Daily Mail *