Tinkers

A complex, vivid, and occasionally surreal examination of diffuse family relationships largely told from the viewpoint of a man in the final stages of dying. As his family dutifully tends him, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of reality. Harding also integrates the troubled lives of Crosby's father and grandfather into the narrative. The prevailing sadness of eminent death that hovers over this novel contrasts starkly with its fierce reaffirmation of life, of tenaciously clinging to the gift of every new day -- and with what a profound regret the prospect of a limited number of tomorrows is finally accepted.

Pulitzer Prize

American Library Association Notable Book

PEN / Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers Award

In Paul Harding’s stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for.”San Francisco Chronicle

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. . . . Harding has written a masterpiece.” John Freeman, National Public Radio

Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls.” Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Home, Gilead, and Housekeeping

[Tinkers is] a novel that you’ll want to savor. . . . I found reading it to be an incredibly moving experience.” Nancy Pearl

An old man lies dying. Propped up in his living room and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine. As the clock repairer’s time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.

An astonishing first novel of memory, consciousness, and man's place in the natural world.

Paul Harding is the author of Tinkers, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts and Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was a drummer for the band Cold Water Flat, and has taught writing at Harvard and the University of Iowa. A 2010 Guggenheim fellow and PEN / Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers Award recipient, Harding lives near Boston with his wife and two sons.

Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Distributor: Perseus Distribution
Publication Date: 01-01-2009
Pages: 192
Measurements: 7.10in X 5.10in X 6.80oz