Tin Man

From internationally bestselling author Sarah Winman comes an unforgettable and heartbreaking novel celebrating love in all its forms and the little moments that make up the life of an autoworker in a small working-class town.

This is almost a love story. But it’s not as simple as that.

     Ellis and Michael are twelve when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more.
     But then we fast-forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question, what happened in the years between?
     With beautiful prose and characters that are so real they jump off the page, Tin Man is a love letter to human kindness and friendship, and to loss and living.“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

“[Tin Man has] themes of childhood bonds and traumas, and gay love, which she evokes with tender sympathy… [it’s] a beautiful reminder of how reading fiction can increase empathy.” —The Times

“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.” —

“[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

“Tinged with a palpable sense of sadness and loss, this beautiful work is ultimately hopeful and achingly human.” —Zip06

“Half love story and half identity quest, Sarah Winman’s Tin Man is 100 percent beautiful. It’s the perfect book to completely drag you out of your own personal reality and into someone else’s for a little while, and you’ll find yourself reading it again and again.” —PopSugar

“[An] achingly beautiful novel about love and friendship… Without sentimentality or melodrama, Winman stirringly depicts how people either interfere with or allow themselves and others to follow their hearts.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Strong characters, settings, and ambiance mark Winman’s unique and uniquely affecting story of love’s varieties, phases, and ability to bend time.” —Booklist

“Each spare sentence as delicate as a brushstroke; combined they paint a vibrant, emotional work that will leave you enthralled. I was deeply moved.” —Steven Rowley, author of Lily and the Octopus

“Beautifully nuanced, tender and touching, this book may break your heart, but it’ll also boost your spirits.” —Canadian Living  

“[Winman’s] writing triggers a thirst to read, see, listen and do more. To live life to the brim and to feel – as they say on the internet – all the feels.” —The Sydney Morning Herald

“Captivating, expressive and unforgettable… [Tin Man] packs a powerful, evocative and wonderful punch.” —Bristol Herald 

“Exquisitely written and introspective.” —BookTrib

“Laced with tenderness and kindness, Winman’s latest novel is the story of three people and their lives of love, beauty and roads untaken…. Rich in emotion and proves that great things do come in small packages.” —BookPage 

“Plan to read it twice: first for the story, then to savor the beauty of the poetic symbolism threaded throughout the sparsely crafted prose.” —Shelf Awareness

“A heartbreaking celebration of love in all its forms, and the moments that illuminate the life of one man. Sarah Winman…has written a beautifully crafted book which is much more than a simple love story…She understands the complications of young childhood love and how it can develop into something different but the bond is never broken. Her warmth and compassion for two boys discovering their sexuality is portrayed with such intimacy yet it never crosses the boundary into seediness.” —The CountryWives

“Winman (“When God Was a Rabbit“) has crafted something of a small miracle here. Though the novel clocks in at a only little over 200 pages, so much is contained in it — the complicated nature of love, the power of art to inspire and sustain, the half-life of grief and regret, the liberation of (French!) travel, the grace found in small moments of kindness — it’s like a literary version of the Tardis.” —The New York TimesSARAH WINMAN is the author of three other novels, Still Life, A Year of Marvelous Ways, and When God Was a Rabbit. She grew up in Essex and now lives in London. She attended the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art and went on to act in theatre, film, and television.Book Club Guide for Tin Man
 
1.       Tin Man is narrated by both Michael and Ellis, each in a different section. What was this reading experience like? Whose story is this?
2.       The female characters in the novel are pivotal in Michael’s and Ellis’s lives—we see this through Dora and her kindness to Michael, Mabel taking in Ellis, and then Annie taking on Michael as almost an integral part of her relationship with Ellis. In what ways do these three women underpin Michael’s and Ellis’s lives, and their relationship?
3.       What do you think the title, Tin Man, refers to? Discuss its possible meanings.
4.       Discuss the use of the colour yellow throughout the story, taking a close look at the van Gogh painting that features in the book.
5.       How is Michael and Ellis’s relationship affected by the time and place they live in? Consider their childhood in Oxford, their summer in France, and their adult lives after Michael returns.
6.       Discuss the different ways that grief and mourning are portrayed in Tin Man. Think about the reactions of Ellis, his father, and Michael after losing someone they love.
7.       Ellis and Michael each describe their summer together in France in 1969. Discuss this pivotal time period and its impact on the characters, as well as your experience reading about it from two different points of view.
8.       How does Annie connect with both Ellis and Michael? How did you see her role in the trio?
9.       What do you imagine happens to Ellis after the close of the book? What kind of life do you hope he lives?
10.   Do you think Tin Man is ultimately a sad story? A hopeful one? How did you feel after reaching the end of the novel?1950

All Dora Judd ever told anyone about that night three weeks before Christmas was that she won the painting in a raffle.

She remembered being out in the back garden, as lights from the Cowley Car Plant spilled across the darkening sky, smoking her last cigarette, thinking there must be more to life.

Back inside, her husband said, Bloody move it, will you, and she said, Give it a rest, Len, and she began to undo her housedress as she made her way upstairs. In the bedroom, she looked at herself sideways in the mirror, her hands feeling for the progression of her pregnancy, this new life she knew was a son.

She sat down at her dressing table and rested her chin on her hands. She thought her eyes looked tired, her skin dry. She painted her lips red and the color instantly lifted her face. It did little for her mood, however.

The moment she walked through the door of the Community Center, she knew it had been a mistake to come. The room was smoky and festive drinkers jostled as they tried to get to the bar. She followed her husband through the crowds and the intermittent wafts of perfume and hair oil, bodies and beer.

She wasn’t up for socializing with him anymore, not the way he behaved with his friends, making a point of looking at every pretty thing that passed, making sure she was watching. She stood off to the side holding a glass of warm orange juice that was beginning to make her feel sick. Thank God Mrs. Powys made a beeline for her, clutching a book of raffle tickets.

Top prize was a bottle of Scotch whisky, said Mrs. Powys, as she took Dora over to the table where the prizes were laid out. Then we have a radio, a voucher for a haircut and set at Audrey’s Coiffure, a tin of Quality Street sweets, a pewter hip flask, and lastly—and she leaned forward for this confidence—a midsize oil painting of very little worth. Albeit a fine copy of a European work of art, she added with a wink.

Dora had seen the original on a school trip to London at the National Gallery’s Pimlico site. Fifteen years old she’d been, full of the contradictions of that age. But when she had entered the gallery room, the storm shutters around her heart flew open and she knew immediately that this was the life she wanted: Freedom. Possibility. Beauty.

There were other paintings in the room, too, she ­remembered—van Gogh’s Chair and Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières—but it was as if she had fallen under this particular painting’s spell, and whatever had transfixed her then, and drawn her into the inescapable confines of its frame, was exactly what was pleading with her now.

Mrs. Judd? said Mrs. Powys.

Mrs. Judd? repeated Mrs. Powys. Can I tempt you to a ticket, then?

What?

A raffle ticket?

Oh, yes. Of course.

The lights flickered on and off and a man tapped a spoon against a glass. The room quietened as Mrs. Powys made a great show of reaching into the cardboard box and pulling out the first winning ticket. Number seventeen, she said, grandly.

Dora was too distracted by the feelings of nausea to hear Mrs. Powys, and it was only when the woman next to her nudged her and said, It’s you! that Dora realized she had won. She held up her ticket and said, I’m seventeen! and Mrs. Powys shouted, It’s Mrs. Judd! Mrs. Judd is our first winner! and led her over to the table to take her pick of the prizes.

Leonard shouted out for her to choose the whisky.

Mrs. Judd? said Mrs. Powys, quietly.

But Dora said nothing, she stared at the table.

Get the whisky, Leonard shouted again. The whisky! And slowly, in unison, the men’s voices chanted, Whisky! Whisky! Whisky!

Mrs. Judd? said Mrs. Powys. Will it be the whisky? And Dora turned and faced her husband and said, No, I don’t like whisky. I choose the painting instead.

It was her first ever act of defiance. Like cutting off an ear. And she made it in public.

She and Len left shortly after. They sat separately on the bus journey home, her up, him down.
When they got off, he stormed ahead of her, and she fell back into the peace of her star-aligned night.

The front door was ajar when she arrived and the house was dark, no noise from upstairs. She went quietly into the back room and turned on the light. It was a drab room, furnished by one pay packet, his. Two armchairs were set by the hearth and a large dining table that had witnessed little conversation over the years blocked the way to the kitchen. There was nothing on those brown walls except a mirror, and Dora knew she should hang the painting in the shadow of the dresser away from his sight, but she couldn’t help herself, not that night. And she knew if she didn’t do it then, she never would. She went to the kitchen and opened his toolbox. She took out a hammer and a nail and came back to the wall. A few gentle taps and the nail moved softly and easily into the plaster.

She stood back. The painting was as conspicuous as a newly installed window, but one that looked out onto a life of color and imagination, far away from the gray factory dawn and in stark contrast to the brown curtains and brown carpet, both chosen by a man to hide the dirt.

It would be as if the sun itself rose every morning on that wall, showering the silence of their mealtimes with the shifting emotion of light.

The door exploded and nearly came off its hinges. Leonard Judd made a lunge for the painting, and as quickly as she had ever moved in her life, Dora stood in front of it, raised the hammer, and said, Do it and I’ll kill you. If not now, then when you sleep. This painting is me. You don’t touch it, you respect it. Tonight I’ll move into the spare room. And tomorrow you’ll buy yourself another hammer.

All for a painting of sunflowers.

Ellis

1996

In the front bedroom, propped up among the books, is a color photograph of three people, a woman and two men. They are tightly framed, their arms around one another, and the world beyond is out of focus, and the world on ­either side excluded. They look happy, they really do. Not just because they are smiling but because there is something in their eyes, an ease, a joy, something they share. It was taken in spring or summer, you can tell by the clothes they are wearing (T-shirts, pale colors, that sort of thing), and, of course, because of the light.

One of the men from the photograph, the one in the middle with scruffy dark hair and kind eyes, is asleep in that room. His name is Ellis. Ellis Judd. The photograph, there among the books, is barely noticeable, unless you know where to find it, and because Ellis no longer has any desire to read, there is little compulsion for him to move toward the photograph, and for him to pick it up and to reminisce about the day, that spring or summer day, on which it was taken.

The alarm clock went off at five in the afternoon as it always did. Ellis opened his eyes and turned instinctively to the pillow next to him. Through the window dusk had fallen. It was February still, the shortest month, which never seemed to end. He got up and turned off the alarm. He continued across the landing to the bathroom and stood over the toilet bowl. He leaned a hand against the wall and began to empty his bladder. He didn’t need to lean against the wall anymore but it was the unconscious act of a man who had once needed support. He turned the shower on and waited until the water began to steam.

Washed and dressed, he went downstairs and checked the time. The clock was an hour fast because he had forgotten to put it back last October. However, he knew that in a month the clocks would go forward and the problem would right itself. The phone rang as it always did, and he picked it up and said, Carol. Yes, I’m all right. OK then. You, too.

He lit the stove and brought two eggs to the boil. Eggs were something he liked. His father did, too. Eggs were where they came together in agreement and reconciliation.

He wheeled his bike out into the freezing night and cycled down Divinity Road. At Cowley Road he waited for a break in the traffic heading east. He had done this journey thousands of times and could close his mind and ride at one with the black tide. He turned into the sprawling lights of the Car Plant and headed over to the Paint Shop. He was forty-five years old, and every night he wondered where the years had gone.

The stink of white spirit caught in his throat as he walked across the line. He nodded to men he had once socialized with, and in the Tinny Bay, he opened his locker and took out a bag of tools. Garvy’s tools. Every one of them handmade, designed to get behind a dent and to knock it out. People reckoned he was so skilled at it he could take the cleft out of a chin without the face knowing. Garvy had taught him everything. First day with him, Garvy picked up a file and struck a discarded door panel and told him to get the dent out.
Keep your hand flat, he’d said. Like this. Learn to feel the dent. Look with your hands, not your eyes. Move across it gently. Feel it. Stroke it. Gently now. Find the pimple. And he stood back, all downward mouth and critical eye.

Ellis picked up the dolly, placed it behind the dent and began to tap above with the spoon. He was a natural.

Listen to the sound! Garvy’d shouted. Get used to the sound. The ringing lets you know if you’ve spotted it right. And when Ellis had finished, he stood up pleased with himself because the panel was as smooth as if it had just been pressed. Garvy said, Reckon it’s out, do you?

And Ellis said, Course I do. And Garvy closed his eyes and ran his hands across the seam and said, Not out.

They used to listen to music back then, but only once Ellis knew the sound that metal made.
Garvy liked Abba, he liked the blonde one best, Agnetha someone, but he never told anyone else.
Over time, though, Ellis came to realize the man was so lonely and eager for companionship that the process of smoothing out a dent was as if his hands were running across a woman’s body.

Later in the canteen, the others would stand behind him and pout, run their hands down their make-believe breasts and waists, and they would whisper, Close your eyes, Ellis. Do you feel it, that slight pimple? Can you feel it, Ellis? Can you?

It was Garvy, who sent him to the trim shop to ask for a “trim woman,” the silly sod, but only the once, mind. And when he retired, Garvy said, Take two things from me, Ellis boy. First—work hard and you’ll have a long life here. And second—my tools.

Ellis took the tools.

Garvy died a year after retiring. This place had been his oxygen. They reckoned he suffocated doing nothing.

Ellis? said Billy.

What?

I said nice night for it, and he closed his locker.

Ellis picked up a coarse file and smashed it into a scrap panel.

There you go, Billy, he said. Knock it out.

It was one in the morning. The canteen was busy and smelled of chips and shepherd’s pie and something overcooked and green. The sound of a radio crept out from the kitchen, Oasis, “Wonderwall,” and the serving women sang along. Ellis was next in the queue. The light was harsh and he rubbed his eyes and Janice looked at him concerned. But then he said, Pie and chips, Janice, please.

And she said, Pie and chips it is then. There we go, my love. Gentlemen’s portions, too.

Thanks.

Night, my love.

He walked over to the table in the far corner and pulled out a chair.

Do you mind, Glynn? he said.

Glynn looked up. Be my guest, he said. You all right there, Ellis mate?

Fine, he said, and he began to roll a cigarette. What’s the book? he asked.

Harold Robbins. If I don’t cover the front of it, you know what this lot are like. They’ll make it smutty.

Any good?

Brilliant, said Glynn. Nothing predictable. The twists, the violence. Racy cars, racy women. Look.
That’s the photograph of the author. Look at him. Look at his style. That is my kind of man.

What’s your kind of man? You a bit of a nelly, Glynn? said Billy, pulling up a chair.

In this context, my kind of man means the kind I’d hang out with.

Not us then?

I’d rather chew my hand off. No offense, Ellis.

None taken.

I was a bit like him in the seventies, style-wise, that is. You remember, Ellis?

A bit Saturday Night Fever, were you? said Billy.

I’m not listening to you.

White suit, gold chains?

Not listening.

All right, all right. Truce? said Billy.

Glynn reached across for the ketchup.

But, said Billy.

But what? said Glynn.

I bet you could tell by the way you used your walk that you were a woman’s man with no time to talk.

What’s he going on about? said Glynn.

No idea, said Ellis quietly, and he pushed his plate away.

Out into the night, he lit his cigarette. The temperature had dropped and he looked up and thought that snow was threatening. He said to Billy, You shouldn’t wind Glynn up like that.

Billy said, He’s asking for it.

No one’s asking for it. And cut out the nelly shit.

Look, said Billy. Ursa Major. Can you see it? The Great Bear.

Did you hear me? said Ellis.

Look—down, down, down, up. Across. Down. And up, up. You see?

Did you hear me I said?

Yes, I heard you.

They walked back toward the Paint Shop. But did you see it? said Billy.

Oh Jesus, said Ellis.

The horn blared out and the assembly line slowed and the men busied themselves in handover and departure. It was seven in the morning and the morning was dark. Ellis wondered when he’d last seen the sun. He felt restless after shift, and when he felt like that he never went home straightaway because the loneliness would pounce. Sometimes, he cycled up to Shotover Woods, or out to ­Waterperry, just him filling the hours with the dull burn of miles in his calves. He’d watch the morning lighten against the trees and listen to birdsong to soothe his ears after the clash of industry. He tried not to think too much about things, out there in nature, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. When it didn’t, he cycled back thinking his life was far from how he had intended it to be.US