Paul Harding

enon

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This Other Eden

Tinkers

Enon

Harding’s prose is perfect – simple, sharp and creative.

Harding writes with superb sensitivity about the mental and physical effects of a broken heart.

A hypnotic portrayal of loss and resilience . . . Harding is an extraordinary writer, for the intoxicating power of his prose, the range of his imagination, and above all for the redemptive humanity of his vision . . . That Enon is a work of fiction that feels authentic as memoir makes it all the more astonishing.

An extraordinary follow-up to the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Tinkers…His prose is steeped in a visionary, transcendentalist tradition that echoes Blake, Rilke, Emerson, and Thoreau, and makes for a darkly intoxicating read.

I don’t think I’ve read anything quite so strangely moving for a very long time. Such a relief to know there are still writers around who can write about real people, and who notice the world around them, and can turn that into exquisite art. Unbearably tense, but so rewarding as well … every snatch of dialogue seemed pitch-perfect.

Harding’s skillful whipsawing of the reader from the surreal to the quotidian is the best writing he’s done ... Beautifully turned: Harding has defogged his style a bit and gained a stronger emotional impact from it.

Gorgeous and haunting … Harding’s second novel again proves he’s a contemporary master and one of our most important voices.

[A] compulsive read … it’s so delicately written that you can’t help but marvel at Harding’s enormous skill

This is a novel that just requires concentration, is all, and it repays that concentration with writing that is both beautiful and thoughtful.

Enon distils life in small-town New England with the same specificity and grace that Faulkner brought to small-town life in the rural South.

Harding’s elegiac prose is well suited to chronicling the corrosive power of despair

This is a harrowing and a painfully honest representation of mourning the loss of a loved one, but it is also well balanced with the story of the Crosbys’ life in Enon before the tragedy

A powerful second novel … dedication to describing the smallest of details with evocative yet pungent flair hasn’t escaped the latest novel.

[Harding’s] skills reside in creating fully realised and pleasingly odd characters, in engineering surprising and beautiful sentences, and in the eye he has for the minor details of life … Harding is an author who sees the small things others miss … Examining the details of the lives of strangers is Paul Harding’s project and his gift. Hypersensitive to the particulars of ‘this awful miracle of a planet’, alert to every smudge on the consciousness of his narrator, he puts us into a stranger’s shoes and makes us feel, for 238 exquisitely compressed pages, what it might be like to lose everything we love.

This is a harrowing tale and a painfully honest representation of mourning the loss of a loved one. It is well balanced. Not by any means a book to lift the spirits, but a compulsive read.

Enon is a beautifully written book … every page is masterful … a harrowing but deeply worthwhile journey.

Death is an absurd fate, no less harrowing for being inevitable. But the death of a child is the stuff of madness. This is the blow that begins Enon, a beautifully melancholic new novel by Paul Harding…All this sounds heavy-going. Yet Mr Harding ensures that Charlie, despite his sorrow, is still good company. Even as he slides further into despair, his perception warped by grief and drug addiction, Charlie wryly observes his own wretchedness…And there is lightness in this narrative…As with Tinkers, the language of Enon glimmers without feeling precious…Mr Harding captures the poignant aches of parenthood, the way a father may marvel at the sloppy grace of his daughter…And he turns the fictional town of Enon into a vital, storied, memorable place, well worth visiting.

Harding maps his protagonist’s broken inner world in fine, elegiac prose

A bittersweet mixture of bleakness and beauty

Hailed as a masterpiece, Tinkers, Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, is a modern classic. Here, in Enon, Harding follows a year in the life of Charlie Crosby as he tries to come to terms with a shattering personal tragedy. Grandson of George Crosby (the protagonist of Tinkers), Charlie inhabits the same dynamic landscape of New England, its seasons mirroring his turbulent emotional odyssey. Along the way, Charlie’s encounters are brought to life by his wit, his insights into history, and his yearning to understand the big questions. A stunning mosaic of human experience, Enon affirms Paul Harding as one of the most gifted and profound writers of his generation.

The second beautiful, poetic novel from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers.

Enon

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Paul Harding

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