Enon: A Novel (ALA Notable Books for Adults) - Hardcover

Harding, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400069432 ISBN 13: 9781400069439

Publisher: Random House, 2013

Synopsis

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR BY
The Wall Street Journal • American Library Association • Kirkus Reviews

A stunning allegorical novel about one man’s enduring love for his daughter

Hailed as “a masterpiece” (NPR), Tinkers, Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize–winning debut, is a modern classic. The Dallas Morning News observed that “like Faulkner, Harding never shies away from describing what seems impossible to put into words.” 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.

Praise for Enon

“Harding conveys the common but powerful bond of parental love with devastating accuracy. . . . [He] is a major voice in American fiction.”—Chicago Tribune
 
“Paul Harding’s novel Tinkers won the Pulitzer Prize; its stunning successor, Enon, only raises the bar.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
 
“Extraordinary . . . a darkly intoxicating read . . . [Harding’s] prose is steeped in a visionary, transcendentalist tradition that echoes Blake, Rilke, Emerson, and Thoreau.”—The New Yorker
 
“So wild and riveting it’s practically an aria . . . Harding is a superb stylist.”—Entertainment Weekly
 
“[Charlie’s grief], shaped by a gifted writer’s caressing attention, can bring about moments of what Charlie calls ‘brokenhearted joy.’”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“Astonishing . . . a work of fiction that feels authentic as memoir.”—Financial Times
 
“Read Enon to live longer in the harsh, gorgeous atmosphere that Paul Harding has created.”—San Francisco Chronicle

About this title

About the Author

Paul Harding is the author of the novel Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. He was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College.

Reviews

*Starred Review* Harding, a writer preternaturally attuned to the spiraling of time and consciousness, continues the Crosby family story begun in his Pulitzer Prize–winning first novel, Tinkers (2009). Charlie was a solitary boy resistant to the confines of school, ecstatic in nature, and happy in the company of his clock-restorer grandfather, George Crosby. As a husband and father, Charlie loves to read, walk along the Enon River, study the long history of his Massachusetts village, and, best of all, share his passions with his receptive young daughter, Kate. Now all is lost in the shocking tragedy that propels this surreal, apocalyptic odyssey of grief. Writing with ferocious lyricism and macabre vision, Harding lures us deep into Charlie’s memory and dreams, pain and desolation. Over a full cycle of New England seasons, Charlie, afflicted with the self-imposed stigmata of a broken hand and adrift in opiate-induced altered states, descends into squalor, inept criminality, and the terrors of the underworld, enacting his own private dire rituals of mortification and sorrow. Harding’s mythic sensibility, soaring empathy for his devastated yet life-loving protagonist, comedic embrace of the absurd, and exquisite receptivity to the beauty and treachery of the living world make for one astonishingly daring, gripping, and darkly resplendent novel of all-out grief and crawling-from-the-ruins survival. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400069432
• ISBN 13: 9781400069439
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256