The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley: A Novel by Hannah Tinti (Epub)

Description

Samuel Hawley isn’t like the other fathers in Olympus, Massachusetts. A loner who spent years living on the run, he raised his beloved daughter, Loo, on the road, moving from motel to motel, always watching his back. Now that Loo’s a teenager, Hawley wants only to give her a normal life. In his late wife’s hometown, he finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at the local high school.

Growing more and more curious about the mother she never knew, Loo begins to investigate. Soon, everywhere she turns, she encounters the mysteries of her parents’ lives before she was born. This hidden past is made all the more real by the twelve scars her father carries on his body. Each scar is from a bullet Hawley took over the course of his criminal career. Each is a memory: of another place on the map, another thrilling close call, another moment of love lost and found. As Loo uncovers a history that’s darker than she could have known, the demons of her father’s past spill over into the present—and together both Hawley and Loo must face a reckoning yet to come.

Praise for The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“A master class in literary suspense.”—The Washington Post

“Tinti depicts brutality and compassion with exquisite sensitivity, creating a powerful overlay of love and pain.”—The New Yorker

“Hannah Tinti’s beautifully constructed second novel . . . uses the scars on Hawley’s body—all twelve bullet wounds, one by one—to show who he is, what he’s done, and why the past chases and clings to him with such tenacity.”—The Boston Globe

“The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is an adventure epic with the deeper resonance of myth. . . . Tinti exhibits an aptitude for shining a piercing light into the corners of her characters’ hearts and minds.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

User’s Reviews

Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of April 2017: “When Loo was twelve years old her father taught her how to shoot a gun.” So begins Hannah Tinti’s masterful, absorbing novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. Hawley has been on the run for decades. He’s had various side-kicks – his con-man partner Jove, the love of his life, Lily – but for the past decade and a half, it’s been his daughter, Loo. When she turns twelve, Hawley buys a house in Olympus, Massachusetts, the hometown of his deceased wife, and settles down for good. But his penchant for violence and his dark past make settling in far from easy. Loo, too, has picked up the ways of her father – but she doesn’t know the half of it. The novel deftly alternates between present day Massachusetts and Hawley’s younger years to tell the story of the twelve bullets that have scarred his body. Tinti’s gritty, deeply flawed characters are rendered with such empathy that it’s impossible not to root for them. The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is full of action, heart and men and women living on the edge of society. –Al Woodworth, The Amazon Book Review From School Library Journal With her first novel since her Alex Award—winning The Good Thief, Tinti has produced another excellent, teen-friendly narrative, a blend of thriller and coming-of-age that’s full of fascinating characters. Samuel has led a dangerous life, which began with petty crime as an adolescent and became more difficult as he grew older. He bears the scars of 12 bullets, and the story behind each injury is revealed in exciting flashbacks. Samuel and his daughter, Loo, move often to avoid enemies who are looking for him. When Loo is ready for high school, Samuel feels safe enough to settle in Loo’s mother’s Massachusetts hometown, where he becomes a fisherman. At school, Loo is bullied until she attacks her tormentors, and a romance with a bright classmate eases her loneliness and lightens the tense plot. She is a clever, courageous teen who surprises her father when his past catches up with him. The pace of the novel is incredibly fast, and the characters are well developed. VERDICT Tinti’s deft combination of gripping action and deep characterization will attract high school readers, especially those with a literary bent.—Karlan Sick, formerly at New York Public Library Review “Can a man be both a violent criminal and a good father? Imagine a Quentin Tarantino movie crossed with a John Green novel, and you’ll have a sense of what this coming-of-age novel is like.”—Entertainment Weekly “Tinti depicts brutality and compassion with exquisite sensitivity, creating a powerful overlay of love and pain.” —The New Yorker “The book [has] an irresistible velocity that Ms. Tinti sustains to the end.”—The Wall Street Journal “Tinti has established herself as one of our great storytellers. She draws you in with this book, and it’s really difficult to get away.”—Rolling Stone “A shoot-em-up, a love story and a mystery, this is one heartwarming feast of a book.”—People“The term ‘literary thriller’ is almost an oxymoron. It’s the writerly equivalent of threading a needle while riding on a rollercoaster, requiring attention to character and fine prose while hurtling from one near-disaster to another. Only a few writers can pull it off, and Hannah Tinti is one of them. . . . The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is a gripping father-daughter road trip where the bad guys are never far behind. . . . Tarantino-like in its plot twists, action, and violence, the novel sweeps across the country and back and forth in time. Its structure feels as meticulously crafted as a matchstick Taj Mahal.”—Interview “Tinti makes each of her crime scenes wildly different yet equally suspenseful. As skillful as she is, she never romanticizes her bad actors. What most deeply interests her is the stumbling, fumbling humanity that results in bad actions. . . . She fuses urgent, vibrant storytelling with a keen understanding of broken people desperate to be whole.”—Newsday “Even before the official release of The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley in March, early readers deemed it worthy of excitement. . . . At once a coming-of-age adventure, a love story and a literary thriller.”—Time “The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is a miraculous accomplishment in genre-bending: Not only a gripping American-on-the-run thriller, it’s also a brilliant coming-of-age tale and a touching exploration of father-daughter relationships. Regardless of what your reading tastes are, there’s something here for absolutely everyone.”—Newsweek “The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is an adventure epic with the deeper resonance of myth. . . . Tinti exhibits an aptitude for shining a piercing light into the corners of her characters’ hearts and minds. Her ability to lay bare their passions, portraying their vulnerabilities and violent urges with equal insight, leaves the reader at once shaken and moved.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is one part Quentin Tarantino, one part Scheherazade, and twelve parts wild innovation. Hannah Tinti proves herself to be an old-fashioned storyteller of the highest order.”—Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ Every once in awhile, I am fortunate enough to meet a book I carry with me to read at stoplights, in line at the DMV, or anywhere I might have a few spare minutes. ‘Twelve Lives’ is one of those books. I loved its unpredictability and the realness of its characters; as in real life, no one in ‘Twelve Lives’ is all good or all bad.A few other reviewers said they found the ending to be ambiguous, but I don’t think it could’ve ended any other way without turning hokey or unnecessarily depressing. I tend to like clear-cut resolutions as well, but I think a different ending would’ve been disappointing.I read constantly but rarely take the time to write reviews. I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to recommend this great book to others.

⭐ This is the kind of book that wish would not end. Not predictable, beautifully written, great and untypical characters. Does not fit into a genre but explores the theme of transformation. No pat answers delivered and the author does not tell you what to think. You have to find your own way with this book. No black and white here and no formula.

⭐ Loo is the apple of her father’s eye. Dad is the Samuel Hawley of the book’s title and the twelve lives refers to each time he has been shot in an eventful and quite frequently misspent life. He hasn’t been a good boy and while he’s trying to put the past behind him and be a decent-no,a great father it isn’t easy. They move from motel to motel,a few months here,a few months there so often that packing up and leaving becomes a game between the two of them. Loo will hear him wandering their current place late at night checking that all the windows and doors are locked, making sure that his shotgun, rifles and pistols are in their proper places, ready and waiting. He teaches her to shoot and she picks up most of his other tricks just by paying attention. Who knows, by the end of the book a bizarre skill set may just come in handy, you think? Both father and daughter are deeply flawed,eminently human and quite appealing. As our story progresses bit by bit the layers of mystery are peeled away and by the half way point what is left are two protagonists I have come to feel deeply for. Wrapped in a thriller this is a book that at its core is about caring for other people, the emotional ties that bind us,hurt us,nuture us and eventually come to dominate our lives. The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley was shortlisted for the 2018 Edgar award and combines a readily accessible plot with beguiling story telling to make Hannah Tinti a new author worth keeping an eye on. This is the kind of book that I was ready to start reading again as soon as I finished it.

⭐ Samuel Hawley wears the evidence of his past brushes with death on his skin, in the form of scarred-over bullet wounds that are the organizing principle of this fine book. Chapters describing the circumstances under which he got “Bullet Number One,” etc., are interspersed with chapters about his peaceful, if not uneventful, life with his late wife Lily and daughter Loo. Although Hawley is a criminal and the book details his many crimes, it’s also about love and retribution. It’s about universals as ancient as the twelve labors of Hercules.Many chapters are told from the third-person point of view of the adolescent Loo. Typical of teenagers, she is mostly uncurious about her father’s past, accepting his scars and his affinity for firearms as merely the familiar backdrop of her own story. When the book opens, he’s retired from his life of crime, yet its first lines are “When Loo was twelve years old her father taught her how to shoot a gun.”Hawley had a couple of misspent decades, starting with an armed robbery when he was a runaway teenager. His escapades were mostly as muscle-and-gun-for-hire on behalf of someone else, and several of them involved the acquisition of rare and costly timepieces. Gold pocket watches with diamond and sapphire star charts embedded in the case, a rare and ancient water clock called a clepsydra. Hawley hauled the cash, made the trade, returned with the goods. If only it always went that smoothly.Tinti’s choice of time-pieces, and a few other recurrent themes in the narrative—celestial navigation, a great humpback whale, even water—give the book depth and resonance. If you prefer to focus on the fates of Loo and her father, both terrifically engaging characters, these themes do not intrude. (Apparently, the novel has already been optioned for television.)Loo and Hawley have a strong, believable, and loving relationship, but their interactions with Lily’s mother, Mabel Ridge, are far more prickly and at times hilarious. When Lily had arranged for Hawley to meet her mother the first time, she was rightly apprehensive, but he was so in love with her, he was willing to face that Gorgon. “‘Right now,’ said Lily, ‘I’m glad you don’t have any parents.’ ‘Me, too,’ said Hawley. But he was lying. There’d been plenty of times over the past six months when he’d wished he had someone to show Lily off to.”Tinti’s writing is full of similarly honest, unsentimental devotion. The only time his bond with Loo is seriously threatened is when the troublemaking Mabel Ridge makes a devastating accusation against him. When Loo confronts him, Hawley reacts in a way only this deeply imagined character could.Tinti effectively describes their coastal people whose lives depend on the cold bite of the Atlantic Ocean and a continuing supply of fish. Among the townspeople is a lone, but inevitable woman doggedly advocating for making the locals’ fishing grounds—the Bitter Banks—a marine sanctuary. If you want to turn yourself into a hometown pariah, this is a good strategy.Loo finally comes to understand the woman and her motivation, one that could serve as a summary of the whole book: the desperate need to be loved. She sees that people’s hearts are “cycling through the same madness—the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair—like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun.” This desperation is as true for Hawley, with the ever-present likelihood his crimes will one day catch up to him, as for any of them. Or us.

⭐ Haven’t enjoyed a book so much since Donna Tartt’s The Gold Finch. Hawley, the rogue, and his teenaged daughter, Loo, are engaging but Tinti also gives us a rich supporting cast, all with enough backstory to make them believable. I am recommending this one to my reading family.

⭐ This is a story full of morally ambiguous characters. They aren’t really nice, they engage in reprehensible behavior, and yet, one comes to understand and care about them. Samuel Hawley is himself a poignant character in his questionable but tender efforts to make the world a safe place for his daughter, and I found it engaging to watch her development as she moves through childhood and into adulthood, and begins to understand the complexities of the world around her. Even if you find the violence off-putting, Hannah Tinti’s writing is elegant and suspenseful.

⭐ I really like the way this author writes. I definitely don’t consider this a thriller, more like a coming of age story line with violence. I felt invested in the characters. I truly liked the main characters. I didn’t love this book because it left me hanging. I’m a reader who is open to endings being left to the readers imagination. This didn’t work for this book. It’s like she just quit writing and didn’t wrap it up. I needed closure for Hawley and Loo but it just wasn’t there.

⭐ Best book I have read in a long time, but may not be for you. Female author but tough business going on. Impressed that this author has so much back ground info in which to place the action, which shifts from one end of the continent to the other over many years. And boy is there a lot of action. Inventive, surprising and all kinds of back and forth but absolutely tied all together. Great characters. Impending doom at every turn.

⭐ I was surprised by how much I loved this book, was captivated by it. Unusual story line, beautifully written, compelling characters- several levels of a love story- Sam and his deceased wife Lily, Sam and his daughter Loo, her grandmother, others. A coming of age story. hard to put down. hard to explain why i found it so compelling but artfully written, great characters you come to love!

⭐ This is a nicely crafted tale about an unusual father-daughter relationship. The story vacillates between a narrative about the daughter growing up with just her father (a career criminal), interspersed with chapters explaining how the father received each of his 12 bullet wounds. It was a refreshing, engaging approach to tell a story that spans decades. The writing style is interesting and clean; not too wordy. A big “well done” to Hannah Tinti. I highly recommend this book.

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