Tinkers

Tinkers follows George Washington Crosby, an elderly repairer of clocks, in the days before his death. As he lies dying he relives his childhood and remembers his father, Howard, a tinker who sold household goods from a cart in New England and who struggled with epilepsy. The novel moves between the two men’s lives and reaches back to Howard’s own father, a minister who fell ill when Howard was a boy.

It is a book about fathers and sons, solitude and connection. Tinkers was Paul Harding’s first novel, published in 2009.