Book of the Week #37

Tinkers by Paul Harding (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2009)

Tinkers, a first novel from a small and unheralded press, beat the odds to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was also nominated by the NH Dublin Committee for the 2011 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

This week the author, Paul Harding, will be at Gibson's on Thursday, Sept. 16, 2010 at 7 PM. He'll be reading, signing, and taking questions from the audience.

"An old man lies dying. 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 ntique 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. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure. 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 7 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 the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature." (publisher's description)