Tin Man: A Novel
"My favorite book of the year was Tin Man. Sparsely written and achingly beautiful...The most powerful take on love, loss and vulnerability I've read in years."--A Cup of Jo From internationally bestselling author Sarah Winman comes an unforgettable and heartbreaking novel celebrating love in all its forms, and the little moments that make up the life of one man. This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that. Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more. But then we fast-forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question: What happened in the years between? With beautiful prose and characters that are so real they jump off the page, Tin Man is a love letter to human kindness and friendship, and to loss and living.
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Community Reviews
The majority of us enjoyed Tin Man but not necessarily enough to recommend it. Some of us found it hard to get into at first, partly because it jumped around time wise, but thereon found it easy reading. Descriptions such as: 'nice'; 'gentle'; 'flowed well'; 'tragic' and 'some beautiful writing especially about grief' were regularly used. We enjoyed a long and wide ranging discussion about the tragedy of lives not led and being gay at the end of last century. We also explored whether the characters were 'too nice', with one of us wishing for a villain and another responding that the situation was the villain. We questioned the accuracy of the depiction of AIDs sufferers given their appalling treatment in the 80s and 90s. Even though the afterword advised us it was based on a specialist AIDs ward some felt the reality was airbrushed, while others felt this 'discreet' approach worked well. We talked about the (nice!) women and their loving, selfless and non-judgemental support for the orphaned young men which we found moving and not over stated. We generally appreciated the different perspectives and styles in the 2 halves of the book, agreeing that Michael's story filled in some of the gaps in Ellis's, though one of us very much wanted to 'stay with Ellis'. We imagined what life Ellis might have after the story and pictured him quietly contented in Oxford. With scores ranging between 6 and 9, we gave it an average of 7.6
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