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Tin Man: From the bestselling author of STILL LIFE
£5.20
From the bestselling author of STILL LIFE
*As featured on BBC Radio 4’s ‘A Good Read’*
This is almost a love story. But it’s not as simple as that.
It begins with two boys, Ellis and Michael,
who are inseparable.
And the boys become men,
and then Annie walks into their lives,
and it changes nothing and everything.
‘Packs an enormous punch’ Independent
‘Exquisite. I haven’t been so moved and so in love with a book and its characters for a very long time’
Joanna Cannon
‘This book is why I read’ Nina Pottell, Prima
‘Ephemeral yet powerful… Every fleeting moment is worth repeating, again and again’ Stylist
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by Andrea Pattinson
Tin man
Sarah Winman is such a beautiful writer, she pays so much attention to detail in her narratives like viewing and describing a work of art.
The story revolves around the Judd family with the incorporation of Michael, best friend to Ellis.
Art which features strongly in Winman’s writing is interwoven throughout the novel from the love of an old print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers won in a raffle by Dora Judd to the capturing of the boys imagination through their love of art and poetry.
This novel is many things, one being a tale of unachieved potential from the unhappy housewife Dora’s clear knowledge and love of the arts to Ellis’ wasted artistic talent; derided by his father and becoming a worker in the local car plant. This is a story of “sliding doors” where future destinations might have been different had alternative existential decisions been taken.
The narrative flits back and forth through time as we learn about the deep and profound friendship of Ellis and Michael. We share memories often raw and heartbreaking as sexual identities are explored and chosen.
Ellis makes a choice which sees Michael’s hopes smashed into oblivion as he recognises there is “another version of our future, out there somewhere in perpetual orbit.” then “I’d already accepted I wasn’t the key to unlock him. She’d come later.”
The women in the novel are the glue which ultimately holds relationships together. When Ellis marries Annie, Michael is fully accepted by her as part of their relationship; almost a version of a complex love triangle. Carol, who contentiously steps in quickly to fill the matrimonial bed of Ellis’ father actually has a good understanding of the difficulties and challenges within the family and this is recognised in later years by Ellis “ The lingering smell of her perfume and lost misunderstood years”.
This is an emotionally charged novel, packed with love and sadness. Every time I finish one of Winman’s novels I have to take a pause from reaching for another book to digest and disengage from the narrative and re set.
by SusannahB
A tender and exquisitely written story, Sarah Winman’s third novel ‘Tin Man’ focuses on Ellis Judd and on Ellis’s close friend, Michael, who first meet each other as young boys in the winter of 1963. However, our initial introduction to Ellis is in 1996 when he is a middle-aged man working the night shift as a panel beater in a car plant in Oxford – work he takes pride in but a job he was forced into by his bullish father who destroyed Ellis’s ambitions of becoming an artist. We soon learn that Ellis, once the much-loved husband of the lovely Annie, is now a grieving widower and a broken man living alone, and as we read on through a narrative that moves backwards and forwards in time, we learn how Ellis, as a twelve-year-old boy, becomes close friends with Michael, the grandson of the local greengrocer, Mabel, and of how, after Ellis’s mother’s death and his father’s ill treatment of him, Mabel takes Ellis under her wing – a situation that draws the two teenage boys very much closer together. And then later Ellis meets and falls in love with Annie, a beautiful and generous-hearted young woman, who loves Michael almost as much as she does Ellis. This is the story of a love triangle – however, it’s not the sort of story one would usually associate with a love triangle, but a warm, involving and heartbreaking account of love, friendship, loyalty and loss.
A beautiful book, both in content and appearance (I have the American edition with Vincent van Gogh’s ’Sunflowers’ on the dust jacket) and one that it is difficult to do justice to without revealing too much and spoiling the story for prospective readers. Sarah Winman writes exquisitely of situation and setting and although this is not a long book pagewise, the reader (or this one, anyhow) feels as if they have been on a journey at the end of it. Although heartbreaking in places, this is not a sentimental or overly dramatic story, and the author’s empathy with her characters and her emotional insight about the situations they find themselves in is evident throughout the entire length of the book.
4 Stars.
by Book Off I’m Reading
4.5⭐️
I love Sarah Winman’s writing and this was such a beautiful and sad story of love, loneliness and grief with beautiful descriptions of landscape and art. Loved it!