Tin Man: A Novel

by Sarah Winman Narrated by Sarah Winman

Overview

Shortlisted for the 2017*Costa Novel Award

Finalist for the 2019*Indies Choice Book Award: Book of the Year

Longlisted for the 2019*Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Finalist for the 2019 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction

From internationally bestselling author Sarah Winman comes an unforgettable and heartbreaking novel celebrating love in all its forms and the little moments that make up the life of an autoworker in a small working-class town.

This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that.

**** Ellis and Michael are twelve when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more.
**** But then we fast-forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question, what happened in the years between?
**** With beautiful prose and characters that are so real they jump off the page, Tin Man is a love letter to human kindness and friendship, and to loss and living.

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2018 - AudioFile

Author Sarah Winman narrates her latest novel, which is about two boys who meet as tweens and become lifelong friends. Ellis, who quits school early to take the factory job his father insists on, and Michael, a free spirit who embraces life and follows his heart, make an unlikely pair, but their shared pain forges a strong bond. Winman’s performance creates a dreamlike atmosphere that is appropriate for the central viewpoint: that of middle-aged Ellis reflecting on his loves and losses while facing an uncertain future. The prose is beautifully rendered, but Winman’s inability to differentiate her characters while narrating prevents the listener from becoming immersed in this heartbreaking story. The novel, which examines social and family expectations, personal identity, loneliness, loss, and new beginnings, is best read in print. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

Praise for Tin Man
One of Bustle's Best Fiction Books of 2018 
A Finalist for the Indies Choice Award 
A Finalist for the Ferro-Grumly Award for LGBTQ Fiction 
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award

“Winman has crafted something of a small miracle here....The slow build of emotion and the cascade of quiet, well-earned tears are testament to how rich this meditation on love, art, loss and redemption truly is.”—The New York Times Book Review

“The most therapeutic emotional journey of the year.”—EW.com

“Half love story and half identity quest, Sarah Winman's Tin Man is 100 percent beautiful. It's the perfect book to completely drag you out of your own personal reality and into someone else's for a little while, and you'll find yourself reading it again and again.”—PopSugar

“A love story that will break your heart....You'll devour all 213 pages of Tin Man in one sitting, then wish for 213 more.”—HelloGiggles 

“Plan to read it twice: first for the story, then to savor the beauty of the poetic symbolism threaded throughout the sparsely crafted prose.”—Shelf Awareness

“Laced with tenderness and kindness, Winman's latest novel is the story of three people and their lives of love, beauty and roads untaken....Rich in emotion and proves that great things do come in small packages.”—BookPage

“Affecting...[A] universalized fable of love and loss.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune 

“Complex characterization and emotional astonishments... These are real people, in all their anxieties and quirks, their good intentions and their unfortunate choices, just as we all are. And all this is an impressive accomplisment, even for a novelist who already seemed to know the truth about humanity by heart and could spill it onto the page with ease.”—The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“A spare, physically small novel that feels epic... The book is filled, like brush strokes on canvas, with the quiet moments of kindness and true friendship that make up a life.”—Winnipeg Free Press

“[An] achingly beautiful novel about love and friendship...Without sentimentality or melodrama, Winman stirringly depicts how people either interfere with or allow themselves and others to follow their hearts.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Strong characters, settings, and ambiance mark Winman's unique and uniquely affecting story of love's varieties, phases, and ability to bend time.”—Booklist  

“This is an astoundingly beautiful book. It drips with tenderness. It breaks your heart and warms it all at once.”—Matt Haig, author of How to Stop Time

“Each spare sentence as delicate as a brushstroke; combined they paint a vibrant, emotional work that will leave you enthralled. I was deeply moved.”—Steven Rowley, author of Lily and the Octopus

“A beautiful book—pared back and unsentimental, assured, full of warmth, and told with a kind of tenderness that makes you ache.”—Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“Heart-breaking and heart-making.”—Ali Land, author of Good Me, Bad Me

“It's exquisite. There are stories you just feel privileged to read. Sarah's writing breaks you and heals you, all in the same moment, and I haven't been so moved, and so in love with a book and its characters in a very long time.”—Joanna Cannon, author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

“Tin Man is Winman's best novel yet. The playful subversiveness still bubbles away but there's a new candor there, an acceptance of needs and flaws that proves deeply touching. This is storytelling as cruelly kind as fate itself.”—Patrick Gale, author of A Place Called Winter

JUNE 2018 - AudioFile

Author Sarah Winman narrates her latest novel, which is about two boys who meet as tweens and become lifelong friends. Ellis, who quits school early to take the factory job his father insists on, and Michael, a free spirit who embraces life and follows his heart, make an unlikely pair, but their shared pain forges a strong bond. Winman’s performance creates a dreamlike atmosphere that is appropriate for the central viewpoint: that of middle-aged Ellis reflecting on his loves and losses while facing an uncertain future. The prose is beautifully rendered, but Winman’s inability to differentiate her characters while narrating prevents the listener from becoming immersed in this heartbreaking story. The novel, which examines social and family expectations, personal identity, loneliness, loss, and new beginnings, is best read in print. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171848439
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/15/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1950

All Dora Judd ever told anyone about that night three weeks before Christmas was that she won the painting in a raffle.

She remembered being out in the back garden, as lights from the Cowley Car Plant spilled across the darkening sky, smoking her last cigarette, thinking there must be more to life.

Back inside, her husband said, Bloody move it, will you, and she said, Give it a rest, Len, and she began to undo her housedress as she made her way upstairs. In the bedroom, she looked at herself sideways in the mirror, her hands feeling for the progression of her pregnancy, this new life she knew was a son.

She sat down at her dressing table and rested her chin on her hands. She thought her eyes looked tired, her skin dry. She painted her lips red and the color instantly lifted her face. It did little for her mood, however.

The moment she walked through the door of the Community Center, she knew it had been a mistake to come. The room was smoky and festive drinkers jostled as they tried to get to the bar. She followed her husband through the crowds and the intermittent wafts of perfume and hair oil, bodies and beer.

She wasn’t up for socializing with him anymore, not the way he behaved with his friends, making a point of looking at every pretty thing that passed, making sure she was watching. She stood off to the side holding a glass of warm orange juice that was beginning to make her feel sick. Thank God Mrs. Powys made a beeline for her, clutching a book of raffle tickets.

Top prize was a bottle of Scotch whisky, said Mrs. Powys, as she took Dora over to the table where the prizes were laid out. Then we have a radio, a voucher for a haircut and set at Audrey’s Coiffure, a tin of Quality Street sweets, a pewter hip flask, and lastly—and she leaned forward for this confidence—a midsize oil painting of very little worth. Albeit a fine copy of a European work of art, she added with a wink.

Dora had seen the original on a school trip to London at the National Gallery’s Pimlico site. Fifteen years old she’d been, full of the contradictions of that age. But when she had entered the gallery room, the storm shutters around her heart flew open and she knew immediately that this was the life she wanted: Freedom. Possibility. Beauty.

There were other paintings in the room, too, she ­remembered—van Gogh’s Chair and Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières—but it was as if she had fallen under this particular painting’s spell, and whatever had transfixed her then, and drawn her into the inescapable confines of its frame, was exactly what was pleading with her now.

Mrs. Judd? said Mrs. Powys.

Mrs. Judd? repeated Mrs. Powys. Can I tempt you to a ticket, then?

What?

A raffle ticket?

Oh, yes. Of course.

The lights flickered on and off and a man tapped a spoon against a glass. The room quietened as Mrs. Powys made a great show of reaching into the cardboard box and pulling out the first winning ticket. Number seventeen, she said, grandly.

Dora was too distracted by the feelings of nausea to hear Mrs. Powys, and it was only when the woman next to her nudged her and said, It’s you! that Dora realized she had won. She held up her ticket and said, I’m seventeen! and Mrs. Powys shouted, It’s Mrs. Judd! Mrs. Judd is our first winner! and led her over to the table to take her pick of the prizes.

Leonard shouted out for her to choose the whisky.

Mrs. Judd? said Mrs. Powys, quietly.

But Dora said nothing, she stared at the table.

Get the whisky, Leonard shouted again. The whisky! And slowly, in unison, the men’s voices chanted, Whisky! Whisky! Whisky!

Mrs. Judd? said Mrs. Powys. Will it be the whisky? And Dora turned and faced her husband and said, No, I don’t like whisky. I choose the painting instead.

It was her first ever act of defiance. Like cutting off an ear. And she made it in public.

She and Len left shortly after. They sat separately on the bus journey home, her up, him down. When they got off, he stormed ahead of her, and she fell back into the peace of her star-aligned night.

The front door was ajar when she arrived and the house was dark, no noise from upstairs. She went quietly into the back room and turned on the light. It was a drab room, furnished by one pay packet, his. Two armchairs were set by the hearth and a large dining table that had witnessed little conversation over the years blocked the way to the kitchen. There was nothing on those brown walls except a mirror, and Dora knew she should hang the painting in the shadow of the dresser away from his sight, but she couldn’t help herself, not that night. And she knew if she didn’t do it then, she never would. She went to the kitchen and opened his toolbox. She took out a hammer and a nail and came back to the wall. A few gentle taps and the nail moved softly and easily into the plaster.

She stood back. The painting was as conspicuous as a newly installed window, but one that looked out onto a life of color and imagination, far away from the gray factory dawn and in stark contrast to the brown curtains and brown carpet, both chosen by a man to hide the dirt.

It would be as if the sun itself rose every morning on that wall, showering the silence of their mealtimes with the shifting emotion of light.

The door exploded and nearly came off its hinges. Leonard Judd made a lunge for the painting, and as quickly as she had ever moved in her life, Dora stood in front of it, raised the hammer, and said, Do it and I’ll kill you. If not now, then when you sleep. This painting is me. You don’t touch it, you respect it. Tonight I’ll move into the spare room. And tomorrow you’ll buy yourself another hammer.

All for a painting of sunflowers.

Ellis

1996

In the front bedroom, propped up among the books, is a color photograph of three people, a woman and two men. They are tightly framed, their arms around one another, and the world beyond is out of focus, and the world on ­either side excluded. They look happy, they really do. Not just because they are smiling but because there is something in their eyes, an ease, a joy, something they share. It was taken in spring or summer, you can tell by the clothes they are wearing (T-shirts, pale colors, that sort of thing), and, of course, because of the light.

One of the men from the photograph, the one in the middle with scruffy dark hair and kind eyes, is asleep in that room. His name is Ellis. Ellis Judd. The photograph, there among the books, is barely noticeable, unless you know where to find it, and because Ellis no longer has any desire to read, there is little compulsion for him to move toward the photograph, and for him to pick it up and to reminisce about the day, that spring or summer day, on which it was taken.

The alarm clock went off at five in the afternoon as it always did. Ellis opened his eyes and turned instinctively to the pillow next to him. Through the window dusk had fallen. It was February still, the shortest month, which never seemed to end. He got up and turned off the alarm. He continued across the landing to the bathroom and stood over the toilet bowl. He leaned a hand against the wall and began to empty his bladder. He didn’t need to lean against the wall anymore but it was the unconscious act of a man who had once needed support. He turned the shower on and waited until the water began to steam.

Washed and dressed, he went downstairs and checked the time. The clock was an hour fast because he had forgotten to put it back last October. However, he knew that in a month the clocks would go forward and the problem would right itself. The phone rang as it always did, and he picked it up and said, Carol. Yes, I’m all right. OK then. You, too.

He lit the stove and brought two eggs to the boil. Eggs were something he liked. His father did, too. Eggs were where they came together in agreement and reconciliation.

He wheeled his bike out into the freezing night and cycled down Divinity Road. At Cowley Road he waited for a break in the traffic heading east. He had done this journey thousands of times and could close his mind and ride at one with the black tide. He turned into the sprawling lights of the Car Plant and headed over to the Paint Shop. He was forty-five years old, and every night he wondered where the years had gone.

The stink of white spirit caught in his throat as he walked across the line. He nodded to men he had once socialized with, and in the Tinny Bay, he opened his locker and took out a bag of tools. Garvy’s tools. Every one of them handmade, designed to get behind a dent and to knock it out. People reckoned he was so skilled at it he could take the cleft out of a chin without the face knowing. Garvy had taught him everything. First day with him, Garvy picked up a file and struck a discarded door panel and told him to get the dent out.

Keep your hand flat, he’d said. Like this. Learn to feel the dent. Look with your hands, not your eyes. Move across it gently. Feel it. Stroke it. Gently now. Find the pimple. And he stood back, all downward mouth and critical eye.

Ellis picked up the dolly, placed it behind the dent and began to tap above with the spoon. He was a natural.

Listen to the sound! Garvy’d shouted. Get used to the sound. The ringing lets you know if you’ve spotted it right. And when Ellis had finished, he stood up pleased with himself because the panel was as smooth as if it had just been pressed. Garvy said, Reckon it’s out, do you?

And Ellis said, Course I do. And Garvy closed his eyes and ran his hands across the seam and said, Not out.

They used to listen to music back then, but only once Ellis knew the sound that metal made. Garvy liked Abba, he liked the blonde one best, Agnetha someone, but he never told anyone else. Over time, though, Ellis came to realize the man was so lonely and eager for companionship that the process of smoothing out a dent was as if his hands were running across a woman’s body.

Later in the canteen, the others would stand behind him and pout, run their hands down their make-believe breasts and waists, and they would whisper, Close your eyes, Ellis. Do you feel it, that slight pimple? Can you feel it, Ellis? Can you?

It was Garvy, who sent him to the trim shop to ask for a “trim woman,” the silly sod, but only the once, mind. And when he retired, Garvy said, Take two things from me, Ellis boy. First—work hard and you’ll have a long life here. And second—my tools.

Ellis took the tools.

Garvy died a year after retiring. This place had been his oxygen. They reckoned he suffocated doing nothing.

Ellis? said Billy.

What?

I said nice night for it, and he closed his locker.

Ellis picked up a coarse file and smashed it into a scrap panel.

There you go, Billy, he said. Knock it out.

It was one in the morning. The canteen was busy and smelled of chips and shepherd’s pie and something overcooked and green. The sound of a radio crept out from the kitchen, Oasis, “Wonderwall,” and the serving women sang along. Ellis was next in the queue. The light was harsh and he rubbed his eyes and Janice looked at him concerned. But then he said, Pie and chips, Janice, please.

And she said, Pie and chips it is then. There we go, my love. Gentlemen’s portions, too.

Thanks.

Night, my love.

He walked over to the table in the far corner and pulled out a chair.

Do you mind, Glynn? he said.

Glynn looked up. Be my guest, he said. You all right there, Ellis mate?

Fine, he said, and he began to roll a cigarette. What’s the book? he asked.

Harold Robbins. If I don’t cover the front of it, you know what this lot are like. They’ll make it smutty.

Any good?

Brilliant, said Glynn. Nothing predictable. The twists, the violence. Racy cars, racy women. Look. That’s the photograph of the author. Look at him. Look at his style. That is my kind of man.

What’s your kind of man? You a bit of a nelly, Glynn? said Billy, pulling up a chair.

In this context, my kind of man means the kind I’d hang out with.

Not us then?

I’d rather chew my hand off. No offense, Ellis.

None taken.

I was a bit like him in the seventies, style-wise, that is. You remember, Ellis?

A bit Saturday Night Fever, were you? said Billy.

I’m not listening to you.

White suit, gold chains?

Not listening.

All right, all right. Truce? said Billy.

Glynn reached across for the ketchup.

But, said Billy.

But what? said Glynn.

I bet you could tell by the way you used your walk that you were a woman’s man with no time to talk.

What’s he going on about? said Glynn.

No idea, said Ellis quietly, and he pushed his plate away.

Out into the night, he lit his cigarette. The temperature had dropped and he looked up and thought that snow was threatening. He said to Billy, You shouldn’t wind Glynn up like that.

Billy said, He’s asking for it.

No one’s asking for it. And cut out the nelly shit.

Look, said Billy. Ursa Major. Can you see it? The Great Bear.

Did you hear me? said Ellis.

Look—down, down, down, up. Across. Down. And up, up. You see?

Did you hear me I said?

Yes, I heard you.

They walked back toward the Paint Shop. But did you see it? said Billy.

Oh Jesus, said Ellis.

The horn blared out and the assembly line slowed and the men busied themselves in handover and departure. It was seven in the morning and the morning was dark. Ellis wondered when he’d last seen the sun. He felt restless after shift, and when he felt like that he never went home straightaway because the loneliness would pounce. Sometimes, he cycled up to Shotover Woods, or out to ­Waterperry, just him filling the hours with the dull burn of miles in his calves. He’d watch the morning lighten against the trees and listen to birdsong to soothe his ears after the clash of industry. He tried not to think too much about things, out there in nature, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. When it didn’t, he cycled back thinking his life was far from how he had intended it to be.











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