Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley (Tinti)

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley 
Hannah Tinti, 2017
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781472234384


Summary
A coming-of-age novel and a literary thrill ride about the price we pay to protect the people we love most.

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.(From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1972
• Raised—Salem, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Connecticut College; M.F.A., New York University
• Awards—PEN/Noral Magid Award, Magazine Editing; Alexa Award
• Currently—lives in in Brooklyn, New York City

Hannah Tinti is an American writer and the co-founder of One Story magazine. Raised in Salem, Massachusetts, she earned her Bachelor's Degree from Connecticut College in 1994 and her Master's from New York University.

In 2002, Tinti co-founder of One Story magazine for which she received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing in 2009. She now serves as the magazine's executive editor.

Her first novel, The Good Thief, published in 2008, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; it received the American Library Association's Alex Award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her second novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley was released in 2017.

Tinti has also published a short story collection, Animal Crackers, which was among the runners-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

In addition to writing and editing, Tinti also teaches creative writing, co-founding the Sirenland Writers Conference in Italy. She has also taught writing at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program, Columbia University's MFA  program, City University of New York, and the Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Tinti lives in Brooklyn, New York City, where in 2014 she was listed as one of the "100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture." (Adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website. Retrieved 3/25/2017.)

Book Reviews
Game of Throne‘s Arya Stark has found her match (or twin) in Loo Hawley, the young heroine of Hannah Tinti’s new novel. Loo’s father, though, is no Ned Stark; Samuel Hawley is a low-level criminal. Even so, despite his violent past, Samuel achieves a surprising nobility, making him one of the most likeable — dare it be said, "admirable" — murderers in fiction. We root for him every step of the way  READ MORE.
P.J. Adler - LitLovers


[A] terrific new novel.…  [Tinti] knows how to cast the old campfire spell. I was so desperate to find out what happened to these characters that I had to keep bargaining with myself to stop from jumping ahead to the end.… Lovely, richly written.… [Tinti is] a gorgeous writer…[with] a profound sense of the complex affections between a man wrecked by sorrow and the daughter he hoped “would not end up like him.”
Ron Charles - Washington Post


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


(Starred review.) [B]eautifully intricate.… [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.
Publishers Weekly


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. —Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [An] atmospheric, complexly suspenseful saga…with life or death struggles in dramatic settings…and starring a fiercely loving, reluctant criminal and a girl of grit and wonder…a breathtaking novel of violence and tenderness.
Booklist


The daughter of a career criminal explores her family's past along with the family business.… The novel is at its strongest when it focuses on Sam and Lily or Loo.… An accomplished if overstuffed merger of coming-of-age tale and literary thriller.
Kirkus Reviews

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