Reviews
Advance praise for Paul Harding's Enon "Drawing upon the same New England landscape and family as his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Tinkers, Harding deftly captures loss and its consequences in this gorgeous and haunting follow-up. [ Enon is] an elegiac portrait of a severed family and the town of Enon itself, and Harding again proves himself a contemporary master and one of our most important writers." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) Praise for Tinkers Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers An American Library Association Notable Book "In Paul Harding's stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for." -- San Francisco Chronicle "There are few perfect debut American novels. Walter Percy's The Moviegoer and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird come to mind. So does Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping . To this list ought to be added Paul Harding's devastating first book, Tinkers . . . . Harding has written a masterpiece." --NPR " Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls." --Marilynne Robinson "A novel that you'll want to savor . . . I found reading it to be an incredibly moving experience." --Nancy Pearl "Like Faulkner, Harding never shies away from describing what seems impossible to put into words." -- The Dallas Morning News, Advance praise for Paul Harding's Enon "Drawing upon the same New England landscape and family as his Pulitzer Prizewinning debut, Tinkers, Harding deftly captures loss and its consequences in this gorgeous and haunting follow-up. [ Enon is] an elegiac portrait of a severed family and the town of Enon itself, and Harding again proves himself a contemporary master and one of our most important writers." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) Praise for Tinkers Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers An American Library Association Notable Book "In Paul Harding's stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for." - San Francisco Chronicle "There are few perfect debut American novels. Walter Percy's The Moviegoer and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird come to mind. So does Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping . To this list ought to be added Paul Harding's devastating first book, Tinkers . . . . Harding has written a masterpiece." -NPR " Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls." -Marilynne Robinson "A novel that you'll want to savor . . . I found reading it to be an incredibly moving experience." -Nancy Pearl "Like Faulkner, Harding never shies away from describing what seems impossible to put into words." - The Dallas Morning News From the Hardcover edition., "Harding conveys the common but powerful bond of parental love with devastating accuracy. . . . Enon confirms what the Pulitzer jury decided: Paul Harding--no longer a 'find'--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 "An extraordinary follow-up to the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut . . . Harding's subject is consciousness rooted in a contemporary moment but bound to a Puritan past. His prose is steeped in a visionary, transcendentalist tradition that echoes Blake, Rilke, Emerson, and Thoreau, and makes for a darkly intoxicating read." -- The New Yorker "So wild and riveting it's practically an aria . . . Harding is a superb stylist." -- Entertainment Weekly "Without blurring the sharply lucid nightmares and recollections, Mr. Harding pushes Charlie's madness to a crisis point of destruction or renewal. The journey to the depths of his grief is unforgettably stark and sad. But that sadness, shaped by a gifted writer's caressing attention, can also bring about moments of what Charlie calls 'brokenhearted joy.'" -- The Wall Street Journal "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. With painstaking brilliance, Enon charts one man's attempt to salvage meaning from meaningless tragedy, to endure the ubiquitous presence of a loved one's absence. A superb account of the banality and uniqueness of bereavement, it more than earns its place alongside such non-fictional classics as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and CS Lewis's A Grief Observed . That Enon is a work of fiction that feels authentic as memoir makes it all the more astonishing." --Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times " Enon is Joan Didion's Blue Nights on major meds. . . . Time was the subject of Tinkers as grief is the subject of Enon . The two are related, like father and sons. Read Enon to live longer in the harsh, gorgeous atmosphere that Paul Harding has created." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Paul Harding's excellent second novel . . . is a lovely book about grief, the ways in which we punish ourselves for feeling it, and, ultimately, how we rebuild our lives even when they seem unsalvageable." --New York Daily News "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." -- Booklist (starred review) "Drawing upon the same New England landscape and family as his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut Tinkers, Harding deftly captures loss and its consequences in this gorgeous and haunting follow-up. . . . Offering an elegiac portrait of a severed family and the town of Enon itself, Harding's second novel again proves he's a contemporary master and one of our most important writers." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "As Charlie's grief reaches its apex, he's consumed by dark visions, and Harding's skillful whipsawing of the reader from the surreal to the quotidian is the best writing he's done." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review), "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. With painstaking brilliance, Enon charts one man's attempt to salvage meaning from meaningless tragedy, to endure the ubiquitous presence of a loved one's absence. A superb account of the banality and uniqueness of bereavement, it more than earns its place alongside such non-fictional classics as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and CS Lewis's A Grief Observed . That Enon is a work of fiction that feels authentic as memoir makes it all the more astonishing." --Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times "An extraordinary follow-up to the author's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut . . . Harding's subject is consciousness rooted in a contemporary moment but bound to a Puritan past. His prose is steeped in a visionary, transcendentalist tradition that echoes Blake, Rilke, Emerson, and Thoreau, and makes for a darkly intoxicating read." -- The New Yorker "Paul Harding's excellent second novel . . . is a lovely book about grief, the ways in which we punish ourselves for feeling it, and, ultimately, how we rebuild our lives even when they seem unsalvageable." --New York Daily News "Without blurring the sharply lucid nightmares and recollections, Mr. Harding pushes Charlie's madness to a crisis point of destruction or renewal. The journey to the depths of his grief is unforgettably stark and sad. But that sadness, shaped by a gifted writer's caressing attention, can also bring about moments of what Charlie calls 'brokenhearted joy.'" -- The Wall Street Journal "Harding conveys the common but powerful bond of parental love with devastating accuracy. . . . Enon confirms what the Pulitzer jury decided: Paul Harding--no longer a 'find'--is a major voice in American fiction." -- Chicago Tribune " Enon is Joan Didion's Blue Nights on major meds. . . . Time was the subject of Tinkers as grief is the subject of Enon . The two are related, like father and sons. Read Enon to live longer in the harsh, gorgeous atmosphere that Paul Harding has created." -- San Francisco Chronicle "Paul Harding's novel Tinkers won the Pulitzer Prize; its stunning successor, Enon, only raises the bar." -- O: The Oprah Magazine "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." -- Booklist (starred review) "Drawing upon the same New England landscape and family as his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut Tinkers, Harding deftly captures loss and its consequences in this gorgeous and haunting follow-up. . . . Offering an elegiac portrait of a severed family and the town of Enon itself, Harding's second novel again proves he's a contemporary master and one of our most important writers." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "As Charlie's grief reaches its apex, he's consumed by dark visions, and Harding's skillful whipsawing of the reader from the surreal to the quotidian is the best writing he's done." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review), Advance praise for Paul Harding's Enon "Drawing upon the same New England landscape and family as his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Tinkers, Harding deftly captures loss and its consequences in this gorgeous and haunting follow-up. [ Enon is] an elegiac portrait of a severed family and the town of Enon itself, and Harding again proves himself a contemporary master and one of our most important writers." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) Praise for Tinkers Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers An American Library Association Notable Book "In Paul Harding's stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for." -- San Francisco Chronicle "There are few perfect debut American novels. Walter Percy's The Moviegoer and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird come to mind. So does Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping . To this list ought to be added Paul Harding's devastating first book, Tinkers . . . . Harding has written a masterpiece." --NPR " Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls." --Marilynne Robinson "A novel that you'll want to savor . . . I found reading it to be an incredibly moving experience." --Nancy Pearl "Like Faulkner, Harding never shies away from describing what seems impossible to put into words." -- The Dallas Morning News From the Hardcover edition., Praise for Tinkers Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers An American Library Association Notable Book "In Paul Harding's stunning first novel, we find what readers, writers and reviewers live for." - San Francisco Chronicle "There are few perfect debut American novels. Walter Percy's The Moviegoer and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird come to mind. So does Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping . To this list ought to be added Paul Harding's devastating first book, Tinkers . . . . Harding has written a masterpiece." -NPR " Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls." -Marilynne Robinson "A novel that you'll want to savor . . . I found reading it to be an incredibly moving experience." -Nancy Pearl "Like Faulkner, Harding never shies away from describing what seems impossible to put into words." - The Dallas Morning News
