`Richly imagined, beautifully phrased, death-bed meditation on a New England life.' --Boyd Tonkin, Independent, Books of the Year
`There is a sense of Beckett's MALONE DIES, yet Harding, who writes with laconic grace and a philosophical serenity, is a gifted original. Poised and formal, yet conversational, TINKERS is about history as well as individual secrets. Most of all, this limpid little novel is a celebration of the singular ease of the finest of US writing.' --Irish Times, Books of the Year
`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
`A wonderful, lyrical evocation of life in the backwoods of New England ... Harding's "little novel", though modest in word count and page numbers, is anything but small ... Harding's genius is his prose, incantatory as poetry, sure in its rhythm and balance, a wonderfully confident, singsong reiteration of the mundane details of three lifetimes of struggle against the poverty and climatic ferocity of the backwoods of New England. Modest in size, TINKERS is a triumphant exercise in American pastoralism, in which no seedhead, blade of grass or pebble is unworthy of notice. Harding's response to the natural world has that sharpness of focus John Ruskin once implored from the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in their paintings. Like the Pre-Raphaelites' vision of nature, it has the same effect of irradiating the commonplace with intimations of greatness and divine grandeur...It is a beautiful, moving and elegiac lament on the human condition couched in hypnotic p!
rose.' --The Times
'Its prose is complex...suffused with brilliantly realised imagery and a reminder of how rich the written language can still be ... The book interweaves past and present; indeed it is obsessed with time and memory, and the richness and loss they bring. This is a short book, densely written. It demands concentration and amply rewards the effort.' --Independent
`Paul Harding's startling debut novel is a hypnotic rendering of a dying man's last thoughts ... A novel full of extraordinary things ... Harding's writing ... is a revelation ... Among the many triumphs of this novel, Harding enables the reader to look at the world differently, without the things that normally encumber experience. TINKERS is a considerable achievement.' --Telegraph
By far the most captivating exploration of history, time and consciousness ... It's an expert piece of historical and psychological archaeology, which unpicks the (bewitching) intricacies of ordinary life while also asking the terrifying, unanswerable, yet endlessly fascinating questions that haunt us all: "What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?"' --Observer
`Harding has something in common with Faulkner: a passionate attachment to place - Maine, in this case, rather than Mississippi - and a sense of time folding in upon itself, often with exhilarating effects ... The Faulkneresque manner resonates as Harding slips in and out of dialogue ... Beautiful moments flash and fade ... For all its quasi-modernist pyrotechnics, this is quite a simple story ... A gifted writer ... TINKERS is worth any reader's time. It's an astringent meditation on loss, family ties, and the presence of the past.' --Jay Parini, Guardian
`A dense, elegiac and richly imagined piece of remembering ... Life-affirming and visceral in its detail.' --Daily Mail
`[TINKERS] gains its traction from its form and style, its continually expanding view. Its models are Whitman's rhapsodic long line and Hawthorne's fascination with ancestral guilt and expiation ... The novel has been set free to spiral inwards, untrammelled by chronology ... Harding's real concern is with memory, and the journeys the mind can take even when the body has almost no life left ... The novel's circular time scheme and telescoping reminiscences contain tantalising echoes and patterns ... TINKERS takes an uncompromising look at the complex emotional geometry that exists between parents and children ... As a metaphor for the essential unknowability of parents, spouses, children, the terrible sense of disconnection that can dawn even after years of apparently uneventful family life, this can hardly be bettered.' --London Review of Books
`Prepare to be seduced ... Sometimes a novel beguiles from the opening sentence. Paul Harding's seductive Pulitzer-winning debut does precisely that in a rare narrative of laconic grace and philosophical practicality ... This little novel is a wonder; its tone, poised between the conversational and the formal, is quietly insistent ... Not only has Harding written a life story re-created through a series of dream-like flashbacks; he also demonstrates the exciting possibilities of narrative through his use of time shifts, wordplay, voices and changing viewpoints. His choice of words is emphatic, precise and physical ... The grace of it appears so effortless; it is easy to overlook the technical skill, the shimmering movements and the use of clockwork mechanisms as a device. The story and the stories within it flow like water over stones ... Something sacred and strange and wise beyond belief, beyond mere understanding itself, sustains Harding's tale of one man's death travels deep into the mystery of life and living.' --Irish Times
`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
`Immaculate, clever, clinical and alarmingly precise ... The book is packed with the kind of imagery that fuels serious American fiction.' --Time Out