Tinkers

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 *
‘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.’ – Elizabeth McCracken
‘Tinkers is a remarkable piece of work.’ – Barry Unsworth
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. * Times Literary Supplement *
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. * The Scotsman *

Paul Harding is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, and Enon. He teaches at the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, and lives on Long Island, New York.

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