Tinkers by Paul Harding / Review by John Self

 

PAUL HARDING: TINKERS

John Self

July 15, 2010

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is one of those awards that I follow but don’t often take heed of. For most of the Pulitzer winners I’ve read (such as Updike’s last two Rabbits, Eugenides’ Middlesex, Ford’s Independence Day), they’re books I would have read anyway. Those examples make me forever think that the Pulitzer is an award favouring big books, so this year’s winner is a double surprise: not just a debut novel, but a 185-page debut. (It won against Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, one of the best books I’ve read this year, so expectations were high.) I bought the US edition, but it was picked up in an expensive bidding round by Heinemann in the UK, and has just been published here.

Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth

The list is out … The Booker longlist 2023. Photograph: The Booker prize

Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth

This article is more than 3 months old

The personal meets the political in a list that includes dystopia and SF as well as little-known debuts
 Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Justine Jordan
Tuesday 1 August 2023

Those accustomed to complaining about the number of American writers nominated for the Booker prize since the widening of eligibility in 2014 will get a pleasant surprise this year: the sector that leads is Irish writers – and people called Paul. That’s not the only surprise; the judges have chosen to spotlight some little-known debuts in the place of major novels. While it feels reductive to read the longlist in terms of what’s not included, many will have expected to see Zadie Smith’s September novel The Fraud, and Tom Crewe’s acclaimed debut The New Life, among others.

The presence of four Irish writers, meanwhile, is far from surprising (and that’s without the inclusion of Anne Enright’s fine forthcoming novel The Wren, The Wren, or Claire Kilroy’s scorching tale of new motherhood, Soldier Sailor). Sebastian Barry is a veteran author who pushes himself with each new book, and Old God’s Time is a devastating, dreamlike study of the lifetime repercussions of historic childhood abuse in Catholic institutions. Paul Murray, loved for 2010’s tragicomic Skippy Dies, writes the novel of his career with The Bee Sting, which uncovers a family’s slow-burning secrets against a backdrop of climate anxiety – in terms of pure page-turning pleasure, this is probably the most enjoyable novel on the list. Elaine Feeney’s How to Build a Boat explores the meaning of community and outsiderdom through one boy’s story, while Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, scheduled for September, is a chilling study of Ireland becoming a fascist state.

 

Illustration: Tim Bouckley

‘It took me a decade’: the 2023 Booker prize shortlisted authors on the stories behind their novels

Paul Murray, Chetna Maroo, Paul Lynch, Jonathan Escoffery, Sarah Bernstein, Paul Harding

Saturday 18 November 2023

Paul Murray

The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton)

 Photograph: Patrick Bolger/

I started writing The Bee Sting at the end of 2017. I’d spent the previous 18 months working on a screenplay and I was aching to get back to the freedom and possibility of a novel. But for a long time I couldn’t decide what to write. I had three very different ideas and I started making notes for each one: blocking out scenes, tracing character arcs, all that. Looking back, I can see I was nervous about beginning something new after being away from fiction for so long, and trying to prove to myself that it would work. But notes don’t tell you anything about a novel’s voice, which is the most important thing about it, and which you won’t discover until you actually start to write.

 

The Booker judge Esi Edugyan described the shortlist discussions as ‘often enthralling, sometimes intimate, sometimes charged’.

Just one British writer makes the Booker prize shortlist

This article is more than 1 month old

Chetna Maroo’s ‘mesmerising’ Western Lane has been chosen on a male-dominated list

 ‘Portraits of what it means to be alive today’: how we chose the 2023 Booker prize shortlist

Ella Creamer

Thursday 21 September 2023

Just one novel by a British writer has made the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize: Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. The list is also weighted towards male writers for the first time in eight years.

Four of the six shortlist places went to novels by men: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, This Other Eden by Paul Harding, and If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. Study for Obedience by the Canadian writer Sarah Bernstein completes the list. None of the six authors have been shortlisted for the prize before.

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Previously nominated authors Sebastian Barry, Tan Twan Eng and Paul Murray join 13-strong field including four debuts

Ella Creamer

Tuesday 1 August 2023

A longlist of 13 “original and thrilling” books offering “startling portraits of the current” are in contention for the 2023 Booker Prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award.

The longlist features four debut novelists and six others who have been longlisted for the first time, alongside Sebastian Barry, Tan Twan Eng and Paul Murray, who have seven previous Booker nominations between them.

The Booker prize 2023 longlist

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Canongate)

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (Granta Books)

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (4th Estate)

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker)

This Other Eden by Paul Harding (Hutchinson Heinemann)

Pearl by Siân Hughes (The Indigo Press)

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (Tinder Press)

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Oneworld)

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (Atlantic Books)

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (Picador)

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton)

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Canongate)

 

Paul Harding: ‘not striving for historical credibility but something more fragmentary’.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

This Other Eden by Paul Harding review – a novel that impresses time and again

In Harding’s new book – a tale of racism on an isolated island off the coast of Maine – the Pulitzer prize-winning author’s gifts have found their fullest expression

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Abhrajyoti Chakraborty
Thursday 7 February 2023

H

alfway through Paul Harding’s new novel, This Other Eden, a reporter, a photographer, two doctors and three local councillors visit an isolated island somewhere along the coast of Maine. They have travelled there as part of an official survey committee and are being escorted by a white missionary teacher, Matthew Diamond, who wants to teach Latin and Shakespeare to the island’s racially diverse residents but also feels a “visceral, involuntary repulsion… in the presence of a living Negro”. The story is set in the early-20th century US, when anti-black prejudices were frequently mistaken for scientific truths, and the two doctors in the surveying group could brazenly become members of the “Section on Eugenics in the American Breeders’ Association”. The doctors go about measuring every inch of the islanders’ breathing bodies with calipers and metal rulers, as if they were mere lab specimens. At one point, someone in the group shows a little black girl photographs of a train engine, a telephone, the then American president William Taft, and asks her to identify the images. Despite his racist views, Diamond is upset by the impertinence of the committee and nearly ends up telling them that the little girl “could answer your questions in Latin”.