Trailer Park Tuesday: Tin Man by Sarah Winman

If the trailer for Sarah Winman’s new novel Tin Man doesn’t reveal much about its plot, it certainly stuffs the viewer full of adjectives. Powerful. Remarkable. Exquisite. Perfect. The bar of expectation is raised to Olympic levels. Though I haven’t had a chance to read Tin Man (out today from G. P. Putnam’s Sons), my interest is indeed powerfully and exquisitely piqued. While the book trailer is poor on details, it’s rich in style. In particular, I love how it flows from one blurb to another, like a stream whose current gently tugs you onward—all of which led me to seek out more information about Tin Man, which in turn led me to this nice blurb from bookseller David Enyeart of Common Good Books in St. Paul, Minnesota: “Michael loves Ellis, Ellis loves Annie, and Annie loves them both. Yet Sarah Winman’s blistering novel Tin Man is anything but the usual love triangle. Instead, Winman asks us to consider what remains of love after its object is gone. She crowds this spare little book, set in London, Oxford, and the south of France, with vivid portraits of loss and mourning. At once terse and expansive, Tin Man is a firework flashing in the night—gone too soon but burned forever into the reader’s memory.” And what about the plot? Reader, I’m glad you asked:

Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys 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?

Trailer Park Tuesday is a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.