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 one man.This is almost a love story. But it’s not as simple as that.Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of … 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.
“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
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ARC from First to Read, Penguin Books. I loved this book. It is sweet and tender and ruthless and heartbreaking. As I read the last page and realized it was the end, I actually said, “No!” Out loud. This book broke my heart and healed my heart.
The cover of Sarah Winman’s TIN MAN caught my eye while perusing the library shelves and I decided to take the book home with me. What a good decision that was because I thoroughly enjoyed the book.
This is a complex story and it’s a credit to the author that she has pared down the story by employing a scarcity of words; it made me want to slow down and savour the words so I missed nothing. By the time I reached the end of the book, I was aware of what had happened to the characters, but it’s the many whys that made me contemplative.
I found the Tin Man to be a poignant story about love, encompassing both the beauty and the pain of it. Highly recommended.
not very much of interest
I fell in love with this story!
Love, grief and hope all wrapped up in sweet, tender sentences.
A haunting story of intertwined lives and loves and unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Beautifully and sensitively written.
Beautifully woven but heartbreaking. Simple, yet complex. Wonderful characters in Dora and Annie. This is a story about friendship, love, longing, loss, grief and survival. I enjoyed the discussions between Michael, Ellis and Ellis’s mother, Dora about Van Gogh and the sunflower painting. The friendship between Micheal, Ellis and Annie was touching.
Sarah Winman’s newest novel is stunning: poetic in language, an understated, deeply moving story of the friendship of two boys who meet when they are 12. To say more about it, I think, would spoil the reader’s opportunity to be immersed in this book.
A wife and mother brings home a copy of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, which becomes her moment of respite from her everyday world. Her son Ellis dreams of becoming an artist, and his friend Michael also finds the painting very special.
Ellis’s mother wanted him to finish school, but after her death, his father insists he leaves school to work at the town factory. Ellis becomes a ‘tin man,’ fixing dents to perfection. The painting disappears.
Michael and Ellis form a special friendship, which leaves Michael love-struck while Ellis closes off. When Ellis falls for Annie, the friendship between these three brings joy to Ellis and Annie, but Michael has to move on. Except he never does.
With beautiful language and poignancy, Tin Man by Sara Winman is the story of a love triangle of the late 20th c, a time when working-class men didn’t talk about sexual orientation, and when AIDS was claiming the lives of beautiful young men barely in their twenties.
I received a free ebook through First To Read in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
Touching, poignant, well paced. A compact novel that explores layers of love, across eras, in a small English town.
A beautifully written book which shows experiences as they happen as well as changing perspectives when the characters view past events in retrospect. A perfect example of how the past informs the future &, although we move on, nothing is ever over. All experiences are just a part of us & we are engaged in a conversation between past & present which makes our lives so much richer. My heart aches for these characters as we identify with their journey. Profound truth revealed in day to day lives.
I had never read anything by Sarah Winman and I was blown away with the beautiful prose and tremendous “heart” in this story. As some other reviewers have said, this is a hard book to review.
The story actually begins in 1950, before Ellis is born, when his mother Dora wins a prize at a bar and she chooses a copy of Van Gogh’s picture of sunflowers in the French countryside. She had seen the picture and others by Van Gogh during a school trip to the National Gallery and she felt it represented what she wanted, “Freedom. Possibility. Beauty.” However her life changed, she married and did not have those things, so the picture was the closest she was going to get. Dora places the picture in a place where she will see it daily, a bright spot in the dull place they call home, where most everyone works at a car factory.
We jump ahead to when her son Ellis is 12 years old and meets Michael for the first time. Ellis and Michael are so young but they become more than friends, soulmates really, almost immediately. They do the things that twelve year olds do, swim, hang out, explore nature and talk, they talked a lot, and realized how much alike they were. At one time they began to explore their sexuality and became even closer.
Michael really enjoys Dora’s company and they talk about the painting together and it is clear that they also have a connection. Michael is a sensitive, loving, all giving friend.
The two meet Annie and then they are a trio. They spend all of their free time together and slowly they begin to grow up and after a while the relationship changes. Ellis marries Annie and Michael flees the town and is away for 5 years.
The first part of the book is told from Ellis’s perspective and the second half from Michael’s. Each section moves back and forth in time but still flows beautifully. I did find that I needed to read this book in a quiet place to really absorb the beauty of the writing. Ellis’s life doesn’t turn out quite the way he wanted, he loves Annie but instead of creating art for a living he is forced to work at the car factory and they begin to become an ordinary couple, which is not what they wanted.
Michael has several relationships, one of which was incredibly close. This partner becomes deathly ill and we follow Michael’s path through this tragedy, caring for and then losing another person he loves. He finds some peace working at an inn as a mere “housekeeper and cleaner” but he has a little cottage to himself which faces the countryside which is covered with sunflowers and he is happy for a while. He finally feels that he needs to return to Michael and Annie and he comes back.
He is unsure how Ellis will feel about how he left but Annie assures him that Ellis still loves him. “I start to walk across the road, and my footsteps are loud. He looks up now. He’s squinting. He grins. He puts down the plank of wood and slowly comes toward me. We meet in the middle. I’ve missed you, he says. In my chest, the sound of an exhausted swallow falling gently to earth”.
I will leave you with those beautiful words. I’m sure that I haven’t done justice to this book, it has to be read and absorbed. It’s a story of love, loss, friendship, despair, heartache, happiness, the full range of emotions are laid out in this lovely story.
I received an ARC of this novel from the publisher through Edelweiss, thank you.
I wasn’t sure about this book at first. After reading it I am sure of the love and loyalty between the three characters. It truly will break your heart and yet, mend it again.
Review on Amazon and Good Reads
This is one of those wonderful books that all you need is peace and quiet and I used that to my advantage to sit down and read this book in one day.
This is also a beautiful story of two friends from childhood who explore each other’s sexuality without all the talk about it. I didn’t realize the content until I was fully engrossed into this wonderfully written story and was sad that it had to end and so fast. I enjoyed Sarah Winman’s book and look forward to picking up another one.
Thank you Net Gallery for this opportunity for review this well written, engrossing read. I wish it wasn’t so short and sad.
Cherie’
#netgallery #sarahwinman #penguingroupputnam
If you’re in for a good cry, try this achingly beautiful book. The story of three people that meet when they are young and cannot live without nor with each other. The complexities, impossibilities of love, life and the universe laid out before you in exquisite prose, poetry almost. The story unfolds in a way that keeps you guessing at what happened and has you reminiscing long after you finished the book. Tissues ready? Go!