Thanks to Julia M. Klein for her excellent review of Hunter’s Moon in a recent Chicago Tribune. Read an excerpt of the review below, or read the whole review here »

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.

It’s a familiar trope, to be sure. But these stories, written in a succinctly lyrical prose and punctuated by a sense of unease, still seem fresh and surprising. Caputo’s characters wrestle with ordinary mishaps, the secrets and lies that underpin their relationships, and the fallout from truth-telling.