The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

by Hannah Tinti

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A gripping American-on-the-run thriller . . . a brilliant coming-of-age tale and a touching exploration of father-daughter relationships.”—Newsweek
 
“One part Quentin Tarantino, one part Scheherazade, and twelve parts wild innovation.”—Ann Patchett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth

NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The Washington Post • Paste 

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812989885
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/28/2017
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her short story collection Animal Crackers was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her bestselling novel The Good Thief won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an American Library Association Alex Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Tinti is the co-founder and executive editor of the award-winning literary magazine One Story.

Read an Excerpt

Hawley
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Hannah Tinti.
Excerpted by permission of Diversified Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Reading Group Guide

1. The central relationship in this story is the one between Samuel Hawley and his daughter, Loo. In what ways are they similar, and in what ways are they different? How do Hawley and Loo evoke the special bond between fathers and daughters?

2. So much of this story begins at “The Greasy Pole.” What did you like about this particular chapter? How does it color your under- standing of the distinctive town of Olympus, Massachusetts? How does it shift your perspective of Hawley, as a father and as a man?

3. Discuss the theme of secrets. What are the secrets that drive the action of the novel? How do secrets bring characters together? How do they drive them apart?

4. So many great stories are founded on the distinctions between heroes and villains, but in this novel, the line between the two is not so easily discernable. Who do you feel are the heroes of this story? Who are the villains? How did this novel make you rethink how you define good and evil?

5. Discuss the structure of this novel. How does the switch between past and present contribute to the arc of the story? How does it deepen our understanding of Hawley and Loo, and connect these two very different coming-of-age stories?

6. In this novel we are taken on a road trip across America. How do the themes of travel and searching play a role in this story? Which setting did you enjoy the most? When Hawley and Loo finally settle in Olympus, how does this new, permanent home impact them?

7. As we get to know Hawley and Loo, we begin to understand that “Loo’s mother had been dead for years but she had never been invis- ible.” How does Lily play a role in the novel, even though she is no longer with her husband and daughter? How does her absence drive their actions and motivations?

8. While so much of this novel concerns the stories of relation- ships between characters, there is also great significance in the relationships between these characters and nature—for example, Lily and Loo’s fascination with the stars, or Hawley’s interactions with a whale. How does the natural world contribute to the story- lines of these characters and help them find their places in the universe?

9. This novel focuses on the love between a parent and child, but there is also romantic love between Hawley and Lily, Mary Titus and Principal Gunderson, and especially Loo and Marshall Hicks. Do you think any of these romantic relationships are successful? Why do you think Lily stays with Hawley? How does Loo’s bond with Marshall change her?

10. Objects carry immense significance in this novel, from the watches to the star map to the bathroom shrine of Lily’s things. For Hawley and Loo, these objects represent important memories. How do these pieces of the past influence the present? How do characters’ memories help or hurt them? Which objects did you remember the most after you’d finished reading the book?

Editorial Reviews

If, as a conservative estimate holds, 50,000 novels per annum are published in this country alone, then something beyond a combination of luck, connection, and talent is required to propel a small handful of them to hoopla status as one of the year's "big books." Magic, perhaps.

Conjuring literary magic is at once a matter of repetitive practice and the mysterious workings of a telepathic meter for knowing what readers crave. Only then does an author get a shot at a place in the pantheon. With the publication of The Good Thief in 2008 Hannah Tinti ascended to where the air starts getting thin. With The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, she has reached publishing's empyrean heights. She has pulled off the writer-magician's ultimate trick.

An allusion to celestial attainment is more than apt, considering the foundation of her novel's architecture is built on a modern-day retelling of the Twelve Labors of Hercules. It is also — and here its bona fides as a contemporary literary novel are presented with a flourish — an intricate mélange of propulsive thriller and sophisticated character study, narrated à la mode from shifting points of time and place and dusted lightly with supernatural suggestion. Of the second after a trigger is pulled, we read, "For a brief moment she was nothing but a person in a place and there was no past and there was no future, only this single moment where her life flashed open — and she was awake and she was alive and she was real." Tinti writes like a sharp lathe cuts.

The titular character, a father on the run from a dark past, possesses a superhero's ability to have survived explosive dangers. His co-traveler is his young daughter, Loo (short for Louise). As endearing as her father is sadly affecting, she is an obdurate chip off the old block. Loo is introduced in the first pages with a gun in her hand, while a shot from another rings down the final curtain. Symmetry is something of a fixation with the author. Depending on your preferences it will either amaze how many items she can make appear and reappear (leitmotifs run from gun-firing technique to whales to cigarettes, Chinese food, and a medical kit) or become mildly annoying in its stainless showmanship.

Clever of Tinti, too, to have mined ancient mythology, for its all- too-human characters are the richest lode. Like Hercules, Samuel Hawley is a god with a temper. Samuel is often tempted and found unequal to a challenge; he is as strong as he is weak. He is imperfect and he is great, because he allows himself to be transformed by love. This is his ticket to immortality, to Olympus - - which is here a fictional town in Massachusetts. As in the myths, the natural world is also imbued with the power of vengeance: the ocean and its denizens swallow people without compunction; the constellations above — a recurrent image in a book replete with decorative and ingeniously deployed symbolism — are wistful stories of error etched permanently in the sky.

The plot contains surprises, the mise-en-scène is full of vibrant visual detail, the characters are idiosyncratic, and the climax is as heartwarming as it is unexpected — Tinti's novel seems premade for the screen (so long as the cinematic realization is in the hands of a director who can somehow channel Hitchcock, Michael Curtiz, and Ingmar Bergman). It has, naturally, already been optioned.

The screenwriter will need preternatural talent, too, in order to convey the sort of breathtakingly compressed thematic summaries Tinti is wise enough to drop ever so sparingly into the action.

Their hearts were all cycling through the same madness — the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair — like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun. Each containing their own unique gravity. Their own force of attraction. Drawing near and holding fast to whatever entered their own atmosphere.

Loo grows into her own maturity as her father reckons with his. With elaborate authorial intention the image of the heart, oversized or beating or stopping with a bang, recurs to a simple but powerful end.

Reaching the end of a novel this meticulously constructed is like standing in the stairwell of a multistory building and looking down the vertiginous drop at the many geometric coils of the stair you climbed to get here. The years Tinti spent working on this novel are reflected in it in both good and bad ways, just as its characters are a seamless mix of morally questionable and hearteningly kind. Every writer is of course the god of her own work, rearranging the landscape of creation and animating all who wander in it. This one is very much like an invaluable pocket watch it describes, timepieces being one of almost too many musically repeated figures, whose worth is dependent on the number of "complications" it contains. (That's a term both technical and symbolic.) The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley displays such a high degree of polish that any trace of the maker's hand is removed. Every sentence perfect, every circumstance layered with meaning, effect, intrigue, and forward motion. Can a writer be too good? That's the one question posed by her novel the omnipotent author never foretold.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of three works of nonfiction: The Perfect Vehicle, Dark Horses and Black Beauties, andThe Place You Love Is Gone, all from Norton. She is writing a book on B. F. Skinner and the ethics of dog training.

Reviewer: Melissa Holbrook Pierson

The Barnes & Noble Review

The story is bound together by memory as a kind of highlight film. Which is to say, by memory as it actually is and not as a neat, banal narrative or a huge baroque melodrama. Loo's memories, and her father's, are often triggered by subtle moments: a snatch of song, the rumble of fireworks, the aroma of food, sudden ripples of offstage laughter…we read on, carried by Tinti's seductive prose. She has a deep feeling for the passage of time and its effect on character. And when it's appropriate, she can use her vivid language to express the ripping depth of human pain. As this strikingly symphonic novel enters its last movement, the final bars remind us that of all the painful wounds that humans can endure, the worst are self-inflicted. The evidence is there in the scar tissue that pebbles the body of Samuel Hawley, and there too in the less visible scars on his heart.

The New York Times Book Review - Pete Hamill

★ 01/09/2017
Seamlessly transposing classical myth into a quintessentially American landscape and marrying taut suspense with dreamy lyricism, Tinti’s beautifully intricate second novel is well worth the wait since 2008’s The Good Thief. As his beloved daughter, Loo, hits adolescence, longtime criminal Samuel Hawley forswears life on the run and moves with her to the coastal Massachusetts town where her late mother Lily was raised. Though father and daughter both struggle to adjust, Samuel finds a place in the town’s fishing industry as Loo experiences first love with the quirky son of environmentalists who oppose it. But the consequences of Samuel’s violent past continue unfolding, while Loo’s quest to understand the truth of her mother’s death by drowning may fracture her bond with her father forever. Alternating chapters chronicle Samuel’s past—traced through the 12 bullet wounds that scar his body—and Loo’s attempts to find an authentic self and a future. As the story lines converge, Tinti’s imagery evokes time, space, the sea, and the myth of Heracles without losing the narrative’s sure grounding in American communities and culture. This is a convincingly redemptive and celebratory novel: an affirmation of the way that heroism and human fallibility coexist, of how good parenting comes in unexpected packages, and of the way that we are marked by our encounters with each other and the luminous universe in which we dwell. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

01/01/2017
Samuel Hawley is a career criminal, working since his teens as a low-level deliveryman and enforcer for an organized crime operation devoted to the trade of rare and expensive timepieces. Although he sometimes has remorse for what he is called on to do, especially when innocents get caught in the crossfire, he has little thought for the future until he meets and marries Lily, who then gives birth to their daughter, Louise (Loo). In alternating chapters, we follow Loo's adolescence and dawning realization of who her father is, alongside Hawley's history of violence and unsuccessful attempts to escape his past. Complex political and social issues such as environmentalism (protection of wildlife vs. sustaining a fishing industry central to a town's economy) and gun violence (Hawley is arguably someone who really does need guns for his own protection) are treated in a way that demonstrates compassion for all sides. VERDICT Tinti (The Good Thief) here successfully straddles genres. There is enough action and suspense to satisfy thriller fans, but the core of the story is the character development and exploration of relationships common to literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 9/19/16.]—Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Library Journal

05/01/2017
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

School Library Journal

2016-12-19
The daughter of a career criminal explores her family's past along with the family business.Loo, the hero of Tinti's second novel (The Good Thief, 2008), has spent much of her childhood living out of a suitcase with her father, Samuel, who helps steal and fence jewelry and antiques. Her mom, Lily, died under vague circumstances shortly after Loo was born, but her presence has been constant: Dad places mementos of her every place they've lived. So when their travels bring them to the Massachusetts fishing town where Lily grew up, it's time for a reckoning. Loo spends her adolescence there drawing from dad's tough-guy playbook, breaking the finger of a boy who crosses her and learning how to shoot guns and hot-wire cars. Those present-day chapters are interwoven with scenes from Samuel's criminal past—the "lives" of the title refer to the number of times he's been shot, and Tinti wittily explores each bullet for alternately comic, tragic, and thriller-ish effects. We wear our emotional pains and struggles in our bodies, Tinti means to argue, and scene to scene the novel is graceful and observant. But a dozen bullet wounds also represents a lot of metaphorical heavy lifting in addition to the other overt symbols that lard the narrative (watches, gloves, disorienting carnival rides, a whale, etc.), and at times such detail overshadows Loo's budding relationship and push and pull with Lily's mother; a subplot involving a petition to stop overfishing gets short shrift. The novel is at its strongest when it focuses on Sam and Lily or Loo, whether they're getting out of scrapes or plotting their next move. But for a story about a man who has to travel light, it carries plenty of baggage. An accomplished if overstuffed merger of coming-of-age tale and literary thriller.

Kirkus Reviews

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

From the Publisher