Tinkers (Paperback)

An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls begin to collapse, the windows come loose, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks.

Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down, 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.

(2010 Pullitzer Prize winner for fiction)