Tinkers: 10th Anniversary Edition
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
Special edition featuring a new foreword by Marilynne Robinson and book club extras inside
In this deluxe tenth anniversary edition, Marilynne Robinson introduces the beautiful novel Tinkers, which begins with an old man who lies dying. As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past, where he is reunited with his father and relives the wonder and pain of his impoverished New England youth. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.
The story behind this New York Times bestselling debut novel--the first independently published Pulitzer Prize winner since A Confederacy of Dunces received the award nearly thirty years before--is as extraordinary as the elegant prose within it. Inspired by his family's history, Paul Harding began writing Tinkers when his rock band broke up. Following numerous rejections from large publishers, Harding was about to shelve the manuscript when Bellevue Literary Press offered a contract. After being accepted by BLP, but before it was even published, the novel developed a following among independent booksellers from coast to coast. Readers and critics soon fell in love, and it went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize, prompting the New York Times to declare the novel's remarkable success "the most dramatic literary Cinderella story of recent memory."
That story is still being written as readers across the country continue to discover this modern classic, which has now sold over half a million copies, proving once again that great literature has a thriving and passionate audience.
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Community Reviews
George Washington Crosby is on his deathbed, with his family keeping vigil seemingly around the clock. Clocks play a big role in this story, by the way. George was a clockmaker, and we get all kinds of lyrical descriptions of the inner workings of clocks. George's father, Howard, was a tinker by trade, and we learn, through flashbacks of sorts, not only about George's life but that of his father. Howard was an epileptic. When he finds out George's mother is planning to send him to an asylum, he leaves his family behind in Maine and sets off to start a new life in Philadelphia, never to see his family again except for one last meeting, 20 years later, when he shows up on George's doorstep on Christmas Day.
I had a hard time getting into the story. I'm not sure if it was the poetic descriptions or the lack of dialogue, but I felt like I was looking in on this story through slightly shaded curtains. Everything was a bit hazy. And it would jump from George's story to Howard's and was a little confusing for me at first too. (Later on he starts going back to HOWARD'S father, and I thought, oh, great, just when I was getting a grasp on which generation I was in...)
...he fell into a sort of waking stupor in which his mind was as it is when a person sleeps but his dreams are composed by his open eyes.
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The light, too, shattered like a vast plate and rejoined itself and splintered again, shards and chips and glowing glass and backlit wisps of it turning in hushed and peaceful exchange and saturating everything Howard saw...
clear, recognizable images
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