Review "The most therapeutic emotional journey of the year." —Entertainment Weekly"Reading London author Sarah Winman’s latest novel is like being drawn into a favourite painting, as you stand before it on the wall of the gallery, filling in the meaning and story behind the brush strokes." —Winnipeg Free Press“A beautiful book—pared back and unsentimental, assured, full of warmth, and told with a kind of tenderness that makes you ache.” —Rachel Joyce “This is an astoundingly beautiful book. It drips with tenderness. It breaks your heart and warms it all at once.” —Matt Haig       “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 accomplishment, 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 “Tin Man is a love story that will break your heart. Ellis and Michael have been inseparable since they were 12 years old. As they grow in age, they grow in closeness, questioning and blurring the lines between love and friendship. But then, fast forwarding into the future, Ellis is married to Annie and Michael is gone. And it’s time to find out what happened in between. You’ll devour all 213 pages of Tin Man in one sitting, then wish for 213 more.” —Hello Giggles“Nuanced and compassionate… Winman has revealed herself to be a writer of great empathy and a sensitive chronicler of the impact of grief…beautifully restrained…The writing is powerful and yet understated… With her skilful command of language and deep emotional insight, Winman has produced in the exquisitely crafted Tin Man her best novel to date.” —The Guardian “A marvel, full of love, longing and loss, huge emotions described in such a beautifully understated way that their impact is all the more powerful… heartrending, spare and moving.” —Sunday Express  “Guaranteed to break your heart, Tin Man is a tender and beautiful tale of love and loss.” —Stylist“This beautiful book is why I read.” —Prima            “Packs an enormous punch.” —Independent“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 “Tin Man is Winman's best novel yet. The playful subversiveness still bubbles away but there's a new candour there, an acceptance of needs and flaws that proves deeply touching. This is storytelling as cruelly kind as fate itself.” —Patrick Gale                        “Heart-breaking and heart-making.” —Ali Land        “I didn't think a perfect book could exist, I was wrong.” —Simon Savidge                      “A brilliantly simple and sad novel.” —Observer “It was beautiful, and occasionally, it hurt,' says Michael—and this exactly describes the wonder of this bruisingly tender book.” —Psychologies magazine“[A] small but powerful novel.” —Sunday Telegraph “A beautifully written novel.” —Daily Mail “A short but emotionally charged novel.” —Daily Express“A short but powerful novel about love and friendship.” —Woman & Home  “Echoing the artfulness of a James Baldwin classic with the colourful melancholy of Haruki Murakami … this book is a somehow altogether breathless and loud testament to love, beauty, loss and art, and is perhaps exactly what we need. A true curer, this book is a painting with words that'll leave you hungover in all the right ways.” ***** The Skinny“A slim little gem.” —Good Housekeeping “Be still my hammered, malleable heart. What a mighty little book this is! Sarah Winman’s third novel is an absolute work of art.” —Waterstones.com“As an exploration of human relationships, of love, loss and the passage of time, it’s a beautiful journey.” —Vogue Australia“Beautiful and heartbreaking.” —Sunday Herald“Emotionally devastating.” —Marie Clare “Sarah Winman’s vibrant new novel is a story of friendship, mortality and heartache, told in such beautiful prose that I had to consciously take breaks from it so I didn’t devour it too quickly… deeply moving… the use of language is beautiful and the focus on emotion is such that it left me feeling bereft when I finished the last page… A rare find: an incredibly tender, ephemeral story to savour… ephemeral yet powerful… a series of poignant moments of love lost and found, it will leave you feeling wrung out yet better for it… every fleeting moment of Tin Man is worth repeating, again and again.” —Stylist“A little book with a big heart… A beautiful story about love, loss and longing.” —Red “Tin Man sparkles with a timeless beauty that few other authors can invoke… Tin Man is disarmingly lovely and unequivocally heart breaking… It’s impossible not to fall for these characters; they’re so real, so fragile, and so human…There aren’t very many books like this and it makes the experience of reading Winman’s words so special. Her fiction runs along the page like poetry and she writes the type of sentences you want to read out loud because they roll off the tongue so beautifully. There’s so much feeling in this story and it’s all explored with such tender honesty. Every moment, big and small, feels impossibly important and the fact that it manages to have such an impact without spilling over the 200-page mark is testament to Winman’s excellent and emotive writing. Forget every other novel released this month and just read Tin Man, it’s the perfect tale of love, loss and life.” '★★★★★’ Culture Fly“A haunting, beautiful read.” —Australian Financial Review “There’s a tender, sensual and often painful romanticism at the heart of Tin Man that envelops you in its cloak of words and pulls you deep into its world. You can devour this book in one sitting if you have a day to spare and that is certainly the most delicious and rewarding way to read it… It’s a beautifully crafted tale about love, loss, friendship and what might have been… gentle and powerful at once. A tour de force.” —Australian Women’s Weekly“Winman's characters grieve not only for people but also for the desires they've relinquished, whether sexual, artistic or emotional. The beautifully restrained language makes this Winman's best work till date.” —The Telegraph India“Delirious joy mixes page by page with cruel circumstance.” —Star Tribune Read more About the Author SARAH WINMAN is the author of two novels, When God Was a Rabbit and A Year of Marvelous Ways. She grew up in Essex, England, and now lives in London. She attended the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and went on to act in theatre, film, and television. Read more See all Editorial Reviews
D**S
Over-rated, Trite & Boring
It seems that anything to do with gay relationships at the moment is in. And so a book that has very little merit is suddenly seen as "Tender, Moving and Beautiful." The 2 main characters are dull and never come to life. The fact that they are both in a state of grief does not make up for their dullness. The descriptions are average and go on and on and on ...The only character of any interest; Dora, the mother, who threatens to kill her husband if he takes down her picture disappears after the first few pages. And quoting Whitman's, "Captain, my Captain ..." several times reduces Whitman rather than raises the novel.
J**N
a quiet, understated novel about love and friendship that contains multitudes
This quiet, understated little novel about love and friendship contains multitudes. In an era of increasingly toxic masculinity, it’s a breath of fresh air, reminding us of “the simple belief that men and boys [are] capable of beautiful things.”Ellis and Michael meet at age 12 and develop a deep and special bond, slowly falling in love with one another. But then years later Ellis marries Annie and Michael gradually fades from their lives.In the present narrative, Ellis is a 45-year-old widower, lonely and mourning the loss of the two people who mattered most to him.Tin Man is about what happened in the time between—and how Ellis ultimately finds the strength to move forward. At his lowest, he finds some of Michael’s old journals, and discovers how Michael spent those absent years. Through these journal entries, the full picture is slowly revealedIt’s refreshing to come across a book like this with characters who genuinely love and cherish each other. The common tropes of bitter jealously and betrayal are absent here, in spite of the complex relationship dynamics.Winman’s prose is infused with bittersweet, melancholy nostalgia. Her characters find hope and love in the small moments that make up a life. For such a compact novel, there’s no shortage of joy, heartache and love in its many forms.
S**H
Didn't Keep Me Going
I know I am in the minority, but this book just wasn't my cup of tea. I do think it had some potential, but unfortunately, I found it very disjointed. I did not like the random hopping around with this one, and I usually like that in a book. I also did not like the lack of quotation marks - maybe that is the teacher in me - but it made it difficult to read. I did like some of the characters, especially Annie. And, there were parts of the story that got my attention, only to be cut short, or disrupted by moving around to another part of the story. I did finish it, however, it won't be one that I recommend.
S**A
Depressing Story
I definitely wouldn’t describe this as a book that I couldn’t stand to put down. I read it as part of a book club and may have got 20 percent of the way through to book, put it down for about 3 weeks, and then had to cram read the weekend before our book club meeting! I finished the book about 2 hours before the meeting. I got pretty bored towards the end of the book because it was nearly over and I just felt like it hadn’t actually gone anywhere. I enjoyed some of the themes in the book, however the writing style was so bizarre that it was hard in the beginning to really engage with the story. There were no quotation marks to signify conversation between the characters, and as a bit of a grammar and punctuation queen, this really bothered me. Some conversations were held in paragraphs and that made it extremely difficult to know what was meant to be speech. But then it got easier to understand as I read further into the book, and I’m not sure if I got used to it, or if at some point the author started to have speech written on one line at a time. Which is confusing anyway because why start with one style and then switch? I’m not sure if that’s just bad editing? Overall I wouldn’t be raving to anybody to read this story. It was a bit of a depressing story. Giving 3 stars was particularly generous!
M**M
Men and boys (and women) are capable of beautiful things.
This is a brilliant, moving, complex and in some ways suspect novel. It is very short but reads like an epic. The story it tells is straightforward, but the story-telling is not. It moves back and forth chronologically, and in each segment memories of the recent past complexify the narrative. Further, the words and thoughts of the characters are not separated from the words and thoughts of the narrator, and this too slows down the reading. I am grateful to the author for forcing me to read more slowly and attentively; this is a novel I would happily live in for longer than its 200 pages require.Two English boys fall in love and into intimacy during the time of AIDS. Most of the novel is divided into two large sections, each focused on one of the boys, with the other boy in the near-background. The story, of course, cannot end happily, but the unhappiness is deep and inhabits the whole book. As does the idea of beauty. “Men and boys should be capable of beautiful things” proclaims one of the three compelling women at the center of this book. But older and younger women are also capable of beautiful things, and to me it was astonishing - bordering on the unbelievable - that these three - a grandmother a mother and a wife - should so actively support and underwrite the boys’ love. “Go find him,” the wife of one of the boys, now middle-aged and discontented, tells her husband.The author makes this all work beautifully (that word again), even as she injects magic into the realism. This is a novel to re-read and treasure.
K**R
Another triumph
I love Sarah Winman's books, and here's another to join the ranks. Slow to start, it picks up with the next protagonist and her beautiful writing shines through. A sad haunting story of love and loss. I felt the end was a little brief - Ellis' recovery from grief a bit too immediate and short. Beautifully written though, and oh, the what-ifs!
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