Tinkers - Paul Harding

Written by Paul Harding
Read by Christian Rummel
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 128 Kbps
Unabridged

publisher: Brilliance Audio
Unabridged
5 hours

Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times–bestselling debut novel about memory, consciousness, and our place in the natural world.

Summary:
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 antique 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 seven 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 to the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

About the author:
He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College. Paul Harding is the author of two novels about multiple generations of a New England family: Enon and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tinkers. He teaches at Stony Brook Southampton.

About the narrator:
Christian Rummel is a New York-based actor who has narrated over a hundred audiobook titles in a variety of genres. He is a two-time Earphones Award recipient, for his work on Hollywood Crows by Joseph Wambaugh, and Nelson Demille’s The Gold Coast. He is also the narrator of Jack Campbell’s bestselling science fiction series The Lost Fleet. He lives in Brooklyn.