(Henry Holt & Co., 2019)
From the author of A Rumor of War, The Longest Road, and Some Rise By Sin, a captivating mosaic of stories set in a small town where no act is private and the past is never really past.
Hunter’s Moon is set in Michigan’s wild, starkly beautiful Upper Peninsula, where a cast of recurring characters move into and out of one another’s lives, building friendships, facing loss, confronting violence, trying to bury the pastor seeking to unearth it. Tied together by the perspective of Will Treadwell, a veteran who runs the local watering hole, the stories of Hunter’s Moon show once-a-year lovers, old high-school buddies on a hunting trip, a college professor and his wayward son, a middle-aged man and his grief-stricken father, as they come together, break apart, and, if they’re fortunate, find a way forward.
With a strong, haunting sense of small-town place surrounded by expansive nature and an abiding respect for both old traditions and fresh traumas, Hunter’s Moon offers an engaging, insightful look at everyday lives and also a fresh perspective on the way men navigate in today’s world. With Hunter’s Moon, Caputo once again shows his distinct perspective on the wars we fight outside of and within ourselves, and the scars and healing that come after.
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Praise
The New York Times Book Review (cover story)
“Michigan’s Upper Peninsula encompasses more than 16,000 square miles of northern hardwood forest, broken here and there by hardscrabble towns whose year-round populations is slowly bleeding away. In “Hunters Moon,” Philip Caputo’s powerful new collection of linked stories, the U.P. serves as a repository of damaged men….
“The seven stories in “Hunter’s Moon” act as an unflinching reality check on the state of middle-age manhood at the close of the second decade of the 21st century…. The writer who established himself more than 40 years ago with “A Rumor of War,” now writes from the vantage point of an elder….
“Caputo’s wisdom runs deep. Few writers have better capture the emotional lives of men, their desperate yearning to improve them and their utter lack of tools or capacity to accomplish this task.”
Read the full review by Bruce Barcott »
The Chicago Tribune: “A skillfully wrought, often mesmerizing novel-in-stories”
“…Caputo, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Chicago Tribune, excels at descriptions of nature, which his characters experience variously as sublime, indifferent or hostile. But his deeper subject is the vagaries of human nature, especially in the case of the male of the species. The wildness of Caputo’s woods — which teem with bears, wolves, icy rivers and other hazards — finds an analogy in the wilderness of the human soul….”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “Philip Caputo brings memorable characters together in seven stories”
“… Hunter’s Moon is not an uplifting book. It is laced with tragedy and heartbreak. But what makes it so enticing, what makes you almost want to start it again as soon as you finish it, is the stellar writing and the captivating relationships Mr. Caputo creates among his characters, one of which is the rugged and beautiful Upper Peninsula.
“The dialogue lets a little speak volumes. Most of the characters are troubled or grieving. They manage to hide their pain by being functional, the way many people who are troubled or grieving do….”
New York Journal of Books: “Caputo has woven a multicolored tapestry”
“…The characters are not unlike those portrayed by Shepherd in Buried Child and True West. They are largely plagued by disappointment, disillusion, and a breakdown of traditional values. To this mix, Caputo adds men’s flashbacks of wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The description of two incidents in these wars are more stomach churning and graphic as any photo could be. The veterans’ attitude toward war is spoken through Will in “Lost.” Hearing “Thank you for your service,” he thinks, “Whenever I can fight in a pointless war for you, let me know.”
These are largely stories of men, some friends, some not, fathers and sons. They remember what happened yesterday, they remember what happened 60 years ago, and they visit those memories and resentments on those close to them….”
Kirkus Reviews (☆ starred review)
“Seven linked stories explore aspects of contemporary manhood. Though all but one are set in a small corner of Michigan’s remote, rugged Upper Peninsula, the seven stories that compose this collection are anything but claustrophobic. Probing deeply into the male psyche, Caputo (Some Rise by Sin, 2017, etc.) confidently tackles subjects that include the sometimes-catastrophic price of failure, the relations between fathers and sons, and the emotional battles faced by returning combat veterans. While hunting figures prominently in most of the stories—like “Blockers,” in which three high school friends reunite on a fateful weeklong bird-hunting trip, or “The Nature of Love on the Last Frontier,” set in the Alaskan bush as a father and son lock horns in a tense generational conflict that turns life-threatening—even readers unfamiliar with that pursuit will find themselves immersed in Caputo’s fast-moving narratives. In vivid and minutely observant prose, he writes with assurance about his characters’ wilderness experiences and with equal sensitivity about the captivating natural beauty that surrounds them.
“Will Treadwell, a Vietnam veteran and one-time owner of a popular local brewpub, appears in five of the stories, including “Dreamers,” which is built around an incident of frightening violence, and “Lost,” an understated evocation of the terror of accidental isolation in the unforgiving forest. His recurring presence is a quietly effective linking device. “The Guest,” a portrait of an episodic middle-age affair and the only story with a female protagonist, brings back Lisa Williams from “Blockers” years after her life has been altered irrevocably by the events of the earlier story. The collection’s final entry, “Lines of Departure,” again features Treadwell and a narrator named Phil, whose biography bears some resemblance to Caputo’s own. Unfolding at a weekend retreat for troubled veterans, it’s a compassionate glimpse of how “the psychic pain of war’s aftermath could be as isolating as acute physical pain” and a fitting conclusion to an intense, often unsettling journey into the male mind and heart. Expertly blending plot and character, each of these taut, propulsive tales possesses novelistic depth.”
“Caputo, celebrated author of the classic Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War (1977) as well as fiction, most recently the novel Some Rise by Sin (2017), knows something about combat and violence and the devastating toll it takes. The setting here is the vividly rendered Upper Peninsula of Michigan, but the battlefield nonetheless remains that of men’s souls. While most of the tales involve hunting, Caputo has bigger game in his sights: a study of man versus nature as metaphor for man versus human nature. Both are red in tooth and claw. The linked stories introduce a cast of memorable, three-dimensional, recurring characters, but it is the larger themes of love and sacrifice and the fraught bonds of male relationships that provide the real connective tissue. Caputo expertly crafts his psychologically astute narratives to explore how fathers and sons, combat veterans, and old high-school pals attempt to navigate their own subtly complex emotional terrain to find peace, forgiveness, and hope. As in every battle, some survive and some do not, but Caputo does suggest, at the end, that healing is possible.” — Bill Kelly
“Superb storyteller Caputo offers a tapestry weaving the friendships, losses, and past mistakes of ordinary people. Readers of literary fiction will not be disappointed in this first-rate collection.”
Book Chase
“Hunter’s Moon is vintage Philip Caputo; his fans and longtime readers will not be disappointed.”
“A brilliant series of interconnected stories about relationships and the myriad ways we both rescue and disappoint the people we love most. HUNTER’S MOON is about parents and children, the death of old friends, the recovery from loss and near-loss. In it, Caputo continues to chronicle of ups and downs of our collective character, our better angels along with our worse ones. He proves himself to be a master investigator of the human psyche in the mold of Chekov, Tolstoy, and Bellow.”
―Philipp Meyer, author of The Son
“A poignant and savage tribute to the wilds of the American landscape and to the wilds of the American soul. With HUNTER’S MOON, Philip Caputo show us, once again, why he is a giant of contemporary letters.”
—Elliot Ackerman, author of Waiting for Eden
“Phillip Caputo is one of our finest, and too frequently undervalued writers—a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, author of eight novels, five books of nonfiction, and two memoirs, including the iconic Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War.
HUNTER’S MOON marks a departure for Caputo, and a grand success. Set in the largely untapped literary landscape of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, this collection of short stories, each distinct and self-contained, are subtly and ingeniously intertwined to create a whole. Here Caputo seamlessly combines his journalistic strengths of precisely detailed observation, with the stylistic lyricism of the poet-novelist. His characters, both men, and particularly the women, are beautifully drawn, authentically vivid human beings, representing a broad spectrum of modern American angst, hubris, violence, fragility, heartbreak, resiliency, and hope.
Caputo knows his country with a similar intimacy. His description of the landscape and natural world of the remote Upper Peninsula, as well as those who inhabit it—animal and human—could only be written by a man who has walked, hunted, fished, camped, and, in one of his more harrowing stories, been lost there. This is a superb book, by a master at the top of his form.”
—Jim Fergus, author of One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
“HUNTER’S MOON is nothing short of a revelation–a masterpiece by one of America’s great writers. A kaleidoscopic effort that fractures and fractures again, displaying beautiful shards of what it means to be a human being. Caputo has written a book that will haunt me for many years. I am essentially ill-equipped to describe the deep wisdom, beauty, and horror inherent in this multilayered and stunning work.”
—Nickolas Butler, author of Shotgun Lovesongs and Little Faith
“HUNTER’S MOON brims with a hard beauty that builds upon itself, page by page, story by story, until the smells, sounds and terrain of Upper Michigan come to reside beneath readers’ eyelids. Philip Caputo proved his exceptional literary bona fides many books ago and here he is, again making American life rip and howl. The world needs more men in it like the character Will Treadwell, and literature needs more books like this, mesmerizing and profound at once. I savored Hunter’s Moon and you will, too.”
—Matt Gallagher, author of Youngblood
Publisher’s Weekly
“Caputo (Some Rise by Sin) probes violent masculinity and intergenerational conflicts, largely against the severe backdrop of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula…”
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