2010's winners were announced today. The winner for fiction was Tinkers by Paul Harding. I've never heard of the author or the book, but it sounds interesting. From Booklist:
A tinker is a mender, and in Harding’s spellbinding debut, he imagines the old, mendable horse-and-carriage world. The objects of the past were more readily repaired than our electronics, but the living world was a mystery, as it still is, as it always will be. And so in this rhapsodic novel of impending death, Harding considers humankind’s contrary desires to conquer the “imps of disorder” and to be one with life, fully meshed within the great glimmering web. In the present, George lies on his death bed in the Massachusetts house he built himself, surrounded by family and the antique clocks he restores. George loves the precision of fine timepieces, but now he is at the mercy of chaotic forces and seems to be channeling his late father, Howard, a tinker and a mystic whose epileptic seizures strike like lightning. Howard, in turn, remembers his “strange and gentle” minister father. Each man is extraordinarily porous to nature and prone to becoming “unhitched” from everyday human existence and entering a state of ecstasy, even transcendence. Writing with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense
The books that were shortlisted are: Love In Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin. I'm not familiar with those two books and authors, either. So, I guess I know what to look for on my next trip to the library. I will read and report on them here. Happy reading!
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