Tinkers

An old man 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. Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation to the next. At once heartbreaking and life-affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

"In Paul Harding's stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for: a new way of seeing, in a story told as a series of ruminative images, like a fanned card deck … Beneath the men's stories flows a series of heart-wrenching inquiries into the nature of life on earth, its terrible beauty, and the limits of our ability to comprehend and bear it … What's difficult to convey is the reach, and painful beauty, of Harding's language."   -   Joan Frank, The San Francisco Chronicle