Book Cover Image: Tin Man by Sarah Winman
" data-orig-size="265,400" sizes="(max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px" aperture="aperture" />BOTTOM LINE: Wow
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Date: 15 May 2018
Source: Publisher via Edelweiss
Synopsis from the Publisher:
“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 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.”
My Thoughts: Tin Man is not a long novel. In fact, at 224 pages, it barely qualifies as a novel. Yet what it lacks in length it more than makes up for in beauty and emotion.
The power of Tin Man lies in its prose as we learn what happened between Michael and Ellis and Annie over the years. The feelings the story evokes are strong, stronger than anything I have read lately. Yet in spite of the pain and anguish I felt while reading it, I was hypnotized by the story of two best friends on the cusp of becoming something more. I could not tear myself away from the emotional depths of their individual stories, the agonizing decisions they made, and the love they have for each other – which remains one of the purest loves about which I have ever read.
Tin Man is a story to experience. It is not a story that requires analysis as it is not a story trying to analyze anything. It just is. You let Ms. Winman’s words flow over you as you read and let the emotions come as they will. The story is stronger and the reward greater with the lack of effort you put into reading it.
Related Stories
- Two books perfect for today’s enhanced social justice
- Hilarious and erotic it is not
- In which I confess I am a sucker for stories about magic
