The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

Hawley

When Loo was twelve years old her father taught her how to shoot a gun. He had a case full of them in his room, others hidden in boxes around the house. Loo had seen them at night, when he took the guns apart and cleaned them at the kitchen table, oiling and polishing and brushing for hours. She was forbidden to touch them and so she watched from a distance, learning what she could about their secrets, until the day when she blew out birthday candles on twelve chocolate Ring Dings, arranged on a plate in the shape of a star, and Hawley opened the wooden chest in their living room and put the gift she had been waiting for ­her grandfather s rifle ­into her arms.

Now Loo waited in the hallway as her father pulled down a box of ammunition from the front closet. He took out some .22 rimfires ­long-­rifle and Magnum ­as well as nine-­millimeter Hornady 115-­grain. The bullets rattled inside their cardboard containers as he slid them into a bag. Loo took note of every detail, as if her father s choices were part of a test she would later have to pass. Hawley grabbed a bolt-­action Model 5 Remington, a Winchester Model 52 and his Colt Python.

Whenever he left the house, Loo s father carried a gun with him. Each of these guns had a story. There was the rifle that Loo s grandfather had carried in the war, notched with kills, that now belonged to her. There was the twenty-­gauge shotgun from a ranch in Wyoming where Hawley worked for a time running horses. There was a set of silver dueling pistols in a polished wooden case, won in a poker game in Arizona. The snub-­nosed Ruger he kept in a bag at the back of his closet. The collection of derringers with pearl handles that he hid in the bottom drawer of his bureau. And the Colt with a stamp from Hartford, Connecticut, on the side.

The Colt had no particular resting place. Loo had found it underneath her father s mattress and sitting openly on the kitchen table, on top of the refrigerator and once on the edge

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.

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