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 American Library Association Alex Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her latest novel is The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. Tinti is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning literary magazine One Story.

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Excerpt from Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

Turn the page for an excerpt from Hannah

Tinti’s new novel,

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.