Paul Harding

tinkers

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Tinkers

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Wonderful, lyrical . . . Triumphant . . . A beautiful, moving and elegiac lament on the human condition . . . Hypnotic.

Brilliantly realised . . . a reminder of how rich the written language can still be

Prepare to be seduced... Beguiles from the opening sentence ...This little novel is a wonder

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

A dense, elegiac and richly imagined piece of remembering...Life-affirming and visceral in its detail.

'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 Gilead and Home

'Tinkers is not just a novel - though it is a brilliant novel. It's an instruction manual on how to look at nearly everything...Read this book and marvel.'

'Tinkers is a remarkable piece of work.'

Landscape is evoked by Harding in fine poetic sentences...Different voices from the past speak to each other and create an intricate patchwork quilt of memories...Through memory, time can become curiously compressed or drawn out, and one of Harding's achievements is to capture this sense of malleable time...The novel moves towards a silent climax, giving us a strong sense of memory as "atmospheres" that touch all of us.

The arcane-yet-timeless language he uses is so unique that it defies description...A remarkable discovery...Tinkers is so lyrical, so effortlessly, unassumingly musical that it's practically begging to be read out loud. Harding manages to cram more poetry into his most seemingly functional, throwaway sentences than most poets manage in several slim volumes and I, for one, can't wait for the audiobook version of Tinkers to hit the shops...Tinkers consists of key moments in the lives of its protagonists rendered with searing intensity, interspersed with snatches of poetry and extracts from a (fictitious) clockmaker's manual...The resulting heap of broken images is one that TS Elliot would have recognised...A slippery, pleasingly oblique book.

A miniaturised family saga...Harding's writing has many virtues. His descriptions of spring flowers...have something of Thoreau about them. There are echoes, too, of Whitman's celebratory catalogues and of Robert Frost's scrupulously bleak verse narratives. A fine passage about an abandoned house brings its long dead builders with their "catastrophic voices" and its current ruin into the span of a single sentence...A sense of mutability is beautifully realised in the phrase "the iron in my blood was once the blade of a Roman plow".

A dense, short meditation on memory, time and legacies passed on from generation to generation...A collage of fragmented histories across three...Poetic language is the driving force in this story...Harding is particularly strong on the natural world as he picks apart a relationship between father and son; in this oddly uplifting book, the time and space they occupy is merely a small part of a vividly described pastoral landscape in which nature endures where man will not.

Immaculate, clever, clinical and alarmingly precise...The book is packed with the kind of imagery that fuels serious American fiction.

WINNER OF THE 2010 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

Tinkers

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Paul Harding

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