Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize Winner
New York Times Bestseller
Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times–bestselling debut novel about memory, consciousness, and our place in the natural world.
George Washington Crosby begins to hallucinate eight days before he dies. 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.
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.
Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation to the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.
Praise & Reviews
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
American Library Association Notable Book • American Booksellers Association Indie Next List, Indies Choice Honor Award, and Indie Next List for Reading Groups • International DUBLIN Literary Award Longlist • Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Finalist • Center For Fiction First Novel Prize Finalist
Named One of the Best Novels of the Year by:
NPR * New Yorker * San Francisco Chronicle * Christian Science Monitor * Irish Times * Granta * Publishers Weekly * Library Journal * Barnes & Noble * Amazon.com
“A powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.”
—The 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
“An exquisite novel . . . told with a voice so keen and beautiful as to leave the reader in a state of excitement produced only by literature, and the best literature at that.”
— PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize
“In this lyrical novel, the life of a dying man is examined through the smallest moments of time and memory.”
— American Library Association Notable Book Selection
“There are few perfect debut American novels. . . . To this list ought to be added Paul Harding’s devastating first book, Tinkers. . . . Harding has written a masterpiece.”
— NPR Best Debut Fiction of the Year
“A novel with an old-fashioned meditative quality so perfectly done that it is refreshing to read in a world filled with noises and false excitements. . . . It brings the reader to a closer understanding of his own life than he could have imagined before taking the journey.”
— Granta Best Books of the Year
“This compact, adamantine debut dips in and out of the consciousness of a New England patriarch. . . . In Harding’s skillful evocation, Crosby’s life, seen from its final moments, becomes a mosaic of memories.”
— New Yorker