'Tin Man' by Sarah Winman
- Reed
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
Author: Sarah Winman
Rating: A-
Vibe: Ellis and Michael meet as boys in Oxford and become something more—until life, marriage, and the weight of the 1980s pull them apart. Sarah Winman's Tin Man is spare, poetic, and atmospherically devastating.
Ellis and Michael meet as twelve-year-olds in Oxford, two boys dodging difficult fathers and finding in each other something that feels like safety. Their friendship deepens into something more—and then, as these things often go, life intervenes. Ellis marries Annie. Michael moves to London. The years pass. Told in two halves—first through Ellis, a middle-aged widower smoothing dents out of cars at a factory, then through Michael's journals from the late '80s—Tin Man is a story about the lives we live and the ones we almost had. A print of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, won by Ellis's mother in an act of quiet defiance, threads through the narrative like a heartbeat.
Winman's prose is stunning. Spare and lyrical, each sentence feels carefully weighted, the kind of writing that rewards slow reading. She doesn't use quotation marks, which gives the whole book a dreamlike, memory-soaked quality—like you're watching these lives unfold through frosted glass. That said, the non-linear structure and shifting timelines can be disorienting. I eventually had to stop trying to track exactly where and when we were and just let the language carry me. That's not a dealbreaker, but it does require a certain surrender.
What I appreciated most is that this isn't a story with easy answers. Ellis chooses Annie, but it's not framed as a betrayal—Michael cares about her, too,—just as a friend. The three of them form something real and complicated, and Winman resists the urge to make anyone a villain or a victim. Annie isn't just a convenient plot device holding the triangle together; she's complex and smart. But this isn't her story, and that's fine.
The scenes set during the AIDS crisis—Michael caring for a loved one in hospice, the weight of that era rendered without melodrama or spectacle—are the best in the book. Winman handles gay grief with a restraint that makes it hit harder. There are no sweeping monologues, no death scenes designed to wring tears. Just the slow, grinding reality of loss, rendered with compassion and specificity. For gay men of a certain age, this will feel painfully familiar. For those of us who came after, it's a window into a history we inherited but didn't live through—and Winman treats that history with the seriousness it deserves.
My one hesitation is the ending. I understand the choice Winman made, and it fits the book's quiet, restrained tone. But I wanted just a little more—one more beat, one more moment of resolution or release. It's a minor complaint in a book that otherwise earns its emotional weight.
Tin Man is a bruise of a book—small, quiet, and tender to the touch. It's about first love and last chances, about the roads we don't take and the people we carry with us anyway. Not every reader will connect with its pacing or structure, but for those who do, it lingers.
