With the looming notion of his nearing death, George Washington Crosby lies in the middle of his living room, on a rented hospital bed, surrounded by his family. With the medication taking hold and his body failing him, time becomes a loose construct and the life he has lived—as well as the life of his father before him—become as immediate as reality.

In the unforgiving landscape of rural late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth-century Northern America, Howard Crosby sells goods, his mule pulling a cart full of life’s necessities; pins, coffee, tobacco. In a place where winter brings no income because his neighbours become reclusive and hunker down for it, it is a difficult living, his own violent epileptic seizures sometimes hindering his route. Howard’s observations of the landscape around him make for incredible reading; eloquent and as convincing as if Paul Harding was there seeing it for himself, and looking remarkably young now for someone pushing a hundred and fifty. Later, Howard’s son George will tinker with clocks, his relationship with his father and time always close at hand.

Interspersed with beautiful meditations on Latin phrases and notations on the workings and history of clocks, to whittle it down to a story of a man and his father is to miss the beauty of this novel, which is the writing itself. Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is an original, captivating book that deserves its accolades.