Tinkers by Paul Harding Windmill HK$104
Tinkers caused tidal waves when it won 2010's Pulitzer Prize for fiction. A first novel published by the small Bellevue Literary Press, it seemed unlikely to win a place on anyone's bookshelf much less one of the world's most prestigious literary awards.
It is a worthy winner. The first sentence provides the plot: 'George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died.' Here are the main themes: death, memory and time. One of the titular 'tinkers', Crosby's speciality is fixing clocks. The hallucinations free Crosby from allegiance to past or present, reality or some place even stranger. Take the vision where Crosby thinks his house is collapsing on him. 'But he was nearly a ghost, almost made of nothing, and so the wood and metal and sheaves of brightly printed cardboard and paper...which otherwise would have crushed his bones, dropped on him and fell away like movie props, he or they facsimiles of former actual things.'
