Sometimes a cover just stands out to you. That's how I got into birding (To See Every Bird on Earth, by Dan Koeppel) and while browsing the books at Target last year, Tinkers, by Paul Harding did just that. And it helped that it won the Pulitzer Prize. And it was his first book. I love it when first-time authors get big recognition on their debut book. They might not when they go to try for a second book . . .
Tinkers to me is a quiet, multi-generational story of a line of men in the frozen north and how their time periods held them captive and how they died. The opening page is one of the most beautiful I have ever read and drew me in. In fact, Paul got me a Kindle around Thanksgiving to give me at Christmas, but he wanted me to play with it for a week to see if I wanted to keep it. I downloaded Tinkers first, and read the first few chapters before I had to give it to him to wrap up. For those weeks I thought about the book and its characters and wondered how they were doing.
In many ways it reminded me of Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (which I didn't care for - wrong period of my life to enjoy it, I think) or The Story of Edgar Sawtell, by David Wroblewski (which I loved immensely). I hope that's not offensive to the authors, to compare their books to someone else's. After all, they didn't win the Pulitzer.
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