Introduction

“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

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of April 2017: “When Loo was twelve years old her father taught her how to shoot a gun.” So begins Hannah Tinti’s masterful, absorbing novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. Hawley has been on the run for decades. He’s had various side-kicks – his con-man partner Jove, the love of his life, Lily – but for the past decade and a half, it’s been his daughter, Loo. When she turns twelve, Hawley buys a house in Olympus, Massachusetts, the hometown of his deceased wife, and settles down for good. But his penchant for violence and his dark past make settling in far from easy. Loo, too, has picked up the ways of her father – but she doesn’t know the half of it. The novel deftly alternates between present day Massachusetts and Hawley’s younger years to tell the story of the twelve bullets that have scarred his body. Tinti’s gritty, deeply flawed characters are rendered with such empathy that it’s impossible not to root for them. The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is full of action, heart and men and women living on the edge of society. --Al Woodworth, The Amazon Book Review

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