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Wandering Souls: And Other Stories
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Caputo returns to the heart of the human condition with Wandering Souls, a collection of powerful stories that explore war, love, nature, life, and death.
In the gripping title story, a Vietnam vet revisits the war-torn landscape of his past, searching for the grave of a forgotten soldier—only to uncover far more than he bargained for. In another tale, a wildlife photographer in the African savanna risks everything for a chance at true love. A thief escaping Central America finds himself aboard a ship, only to be thrust into the peril of an approaching storm. These and other stories in Wandering Souls are told with the authenticity and keen insight that have made Caputo’s writing unforgettable, offering emotionally intense and richly atmospheric narratives.
With his distinctive style, Caputo delves into the complex relationship between man and memory—sometimes haunting, sometimes redemptive—capturing moments of profound emotional reckoning that compel his characters to confront their pasts and the indelible marks left by the places that shaped them. In Wandering Souls, the past is never truly gone; it is a force that defines us, for better or worse.
In the gripping title story, a Vietnam vet revisits the war-torn landscape of his past, searching for the grave of a forgotten soldier—only to uncover far more than he bargained for. In another tale, a wildlife photographer in the African savanna risks everything for a chance at true love. A thief escaping Central America finds himself aboard a ship, only to be thrust into the peril of an approaching storm. These and other stories in Wandering Souls are told with the authenticity and keen insight that have made Caputo’s writing unforgettable, offering emotionally intense and richly atmospheric narratives.
With his distinctive style, Caputo delves into the complex relationship between man and memory—sometimes haunting, sometimes redemptive—capturing moments of profound emotional reckoning that compel his characters to confront their pasts and the indelible marks left by the places that shaped them. In Wandering Souls, the past is never truly gone; it is a force that defines us, for better or worse.
192 pages, Hardcover
Published January 20, 2026
4 people are currently reading
16 people want to read
About the author
Philip Caputo
37 books320 followersAmerican author and journalist. Author of 18 books, including the upcoming MEMORY AND DESIRE (Sept. 2023). Best known for
A Rumor of War,
a best-selling memoir of his experiences during the Vietnam War. Website: PhilipCaputo.com
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 23, 2026
I tend to read a lot more female authors than male, which apparently puts me in the minority of readers worldwide. It's especially unusual for me to read "serious" fiction by men, and while there's a touch of the supernatural in each story collected here, this is still very much the kind of literary writing I actually admire (and regular readers will know how much I despise the vast majority of modern literary fiction churned out by American MFA mills.)
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by my own reaction here given that Philip Caputo won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism back in the 1970s. You know, back in the day when the fourth estate wasn't primarily owned by the obscenely wealthy, who use it to hoard their fortunes by influencing the populace to not demand our nation's rightful due via taxation. Ahem. Mr Caputo's writing in this collection showcases his rightfully lauded journalistic background. It's clear and strong and entirely devoid of fluff, even as he discusses such ephemeral subjects as guilt and its attendant ghosts. Because there are a lot of ghosts in this book, as troubled men seek to deal with the mistakes of their pasts, whether small or grand.
Vietnam figures heavily in the proceedings, again unsurprisingly given Mr Caputo's experiences as a combat veteran in the Vietnam War. The title story begins with a former GI learning that he has a chance to help a woman recover the corpse of her brother Paul Salerno, who vanished while on a combat mission. Our unnamed narrator had actually been part of the squad who originally discovered the remains of Paul's team. The extraordinary circumstances in which the corpses were found meant that our narrator's company had had to leave them behind, in contradiction of the warrior ethos our narrator holds dear. The guilt of that has lingered over the decades, and comes roaring back to the fore when he learns of the ongoing grief of Paul's remaining family.
Returning to Vietnam isn't easy. He's older and wiser, yet not cynical enough to dismiss out of hand the strange visions that seem to keep guiding him in the right direction. The younger people around him have perfectly logical explanations for his ghostly guides, and chide him for surrendering to mysticism. But none of them are prepared for what they find when they come back to the place where he first found Salerno's bones.
While two of the other six stories here are also set in Southeast Asia, they're not all war stories. Coils Of The Past does deal more directly with the horrors of the Vietnam War, as a veteran battles with his complicity in a past atrocity. The Traveler, meanwhile, reflects on a former foreign service officer's youth in Cambodia.
The clash between youthful arrogance and the superstitions of the older generation takes center stage in The Deliverer, a tale set partly on the ocean and partly in the jungles of Central America. The African bush is the setting for A Near-Death Experience, as a photographer falls in love with a doctoral candidate. And while the book's closer, Ezra's Door..., is set on the far less exotic campus of Wabash College, Indiana, it also deals with themes of longing and the supernatural.
All of these tales are infused with a maturity that makes each ghost -- or Wandering Soul -- story feel entirely anchored in reality, while still leaving space for wonder. The regrets and concerns of the protagonists are all valid. Perhaps the reason I enjoyed these stories so much is how active the main characters are in not wallowing in their feelings but in rectifying what they think is wrong. These aren't cautionary tales: instead, they promise that you can atone and do better, no matter how much time has passed, as long as you put the actual effort in. And yeah, that effort is gonna suck sometimes, but a genuinely clean conscience is worth it in the end.
There are, ofc, variations between each story. The protagonist of The Traveler certainly has nothing to feel guilty for except, perhaps, marrying poorly. The sailors of The Deliverer don't know the villain's full story, but certainly can't be blamed for what they do. Refreshingly, guilt never turns into neurosis in any of these stories, despite the main character of Ezra's Door... suffering a severe case of writer's block (with which I can certainly sympathize.)
This collection certainly has a frisson of genre but the stories are all solidly literary, and of an exceptionally high quality. I'm glad I had the chance to start off 2026 with a solid representative of new and truly literary fiction.
Wandering Souls and other stories by Philip Caputo was published January 20 2026 by Arcade and is available from all good booksellers, including Bookshop!
This review originally appeared at TheFrumiousConsortium.net.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by my own reaction here given that Philip Caputo won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism back in the 1970s. You know, back in the day when the fourth estate wasn't primarily owned by the obscenely wealthy, who use it to hoard their fortunes by influencing the populace to not demand our nation's rightful due via taxation. Ahem. Mr Caputo's writing in this collection showcases his rightfully lauded journalistic background. It's clear and strong and entirely devoid of fluff, even as he discusses such ephemeral subjects as guilt and its attendant ghosts. Because there are a lot of ghosts in this book, as troubled men seek to deal with the mistakes of their pasts, whether small or grand.
Vietnam figures heavily in the proceedings, again unsurprisingly given Mr Caputo's experiences as a combat veteran in the Vietnam War. The title story begins with a former GI learning that he has a chance to help a woman recover the corpse of her brother Paul Salerno, who vanished while on a combat mission. Our unnamed narrator had actually been part of the squad who originally discovered the remains of Paul's team. The extraordinary circumstances in which the corpses were found meant that our narrator's company had had to leave them behind, in contradiction of the warrior ethos our narrator holds dear. The guilt of that has lingered over the decades, and comes roaring back to the fore when he learns of the ongoing grief of Paul's remaining family.
Returning to Vietnam isn't easy. He's older and wiser, yet not cynical enough to dismiss out of hand the strange visions that seem to keep guiding him in the right direction. The younger people around him have perfectly logical explanations for his ghostly guides, and chide him for surrendering to mysticism. But none of them are prepared for what they find when they come back to the place where he first found Salerno's bones.
While two of the other six stories here are also set in Southeast Asia, they're not all war stories. Coils Of The Past does deal more directly with the horrors of the Vietnam War, as a veteran battles with his complicity in a past atrocity. The Traveler, meanwhile, reflects on a former foreign service officer's youth in Cambodia.
The clash between youthful arrogance and the superstitions of the older generation takes center stage in The Deliverer, a tale set partly on the ocean and partly in the jungles of Central America. The African bush is the setting for A Near-Death Experience, as a photographer falls in love with a doctoral candidate. And while the book's closer, Ezra's Door..., is set on the far less exotic campus of Wabash College, Indiana, it also deals with themes of longing and the supernatural.
All of these tales are infused with a maturity that makes each ghost -- or Wandering Soul -- story feel entirely anchored in reality, while still leaving space for wonder. The regrets and concerns of the protagonists are all valid. Perhaps the reason I enjoyed these stories so much is how active the main characters are in not wallowing in their feelings but in rectifying what they think is wrong. These aren't cautionary tales: instead, they promise that you can atone and do better, no matter how much time has passed, as long as you put the actual effort in. And yeah, that effort is gonna suck sometimes, but a genuinely clean conscience is worth it in the end.
There are, ofc, variations between each story. The protagonist of The Traveler certainly has nothing to feel guilty for except, perhaps, marrying poorly. The sailors of The Deliverer don't know the villain's full story, but certainly can't be blamed for what they do. Refreshingly, guilt never turns into neurosis in any of these stories, despite the main character of Ezra's Door... suffering a severe case of writer's block (with which I can certainly sympathize.)
This collection certainly has a frisson of genre but the stories are all solidly literary, and of an exceptionally high quality. I'm glad I had the chance to start off 2026 with a solid representative of new and truly literary fiction.
Wandering Souls and other stories by Philip Caputo was published January 20 2026 by Arcade and is available from all good booksellers, including Bookshop!
This review originally appeared at TheFrumiousConsortium.net.
October 1, 2025
“Heart of Darkness” traveler Philip Caputo’s latest voyage into Conradian waters, a collection of short stories with literary overtones, “Wandering Souls,” recalled for me a review I did of his latest novel, “Memory and Desire,” in which I found a secondary character in it, the Joycean scholar wife of the protagonist, strongly enough presented that she could have made for a novel of her own, something that’s also true of a female character in one of the “Wandering” stories who’s not the actual protagonist but who makes a strong enough impression that she could well have been.
Married to the story’s Vietnam-veteran protagonist, she is unsettled enough by something she learns about that he participated in during the war that it has him fearing that she might want to end the marriage and me thinking that it would have been interesting to have gotten the story wholly from her viewpoint, perhaps starting a few years before with her growing apprehension as she picks up bit by bit on something that’s eating at him and culminating in the moment when she gets the full truth of what happened.
And while a female in another of the stories, this one a couple of degrees more removed from the protagonist, never does learn the exact details of what happened to her MIA brother (she’s shielded from the actual truth by the protagonist, whom she has enlisted to find out what happened and who comes to know the circumstances all too well), here too I found myself wondering what it might have been like to have gotten the story from her viewpoint, starting with when she was first notified of the brother’s missing status and continuing with her growing anxiety as she imagines the full range of things that might have happened.
Presumptuous as all hell, of course, my imagining alternative ways in which the stories might have been presented, like a character in Robert Stone’s “Dog Soldiers” who tells the novelist protagonist of a preferred direction he’d have liked to see the protagonist’s novel take and is told that that would have made for a different story. But a mark of very good fiction, it seems to me, and very good fiction these stories are, is that the characters become real enough that they do come to exist for a reader independent of the novel, a notion undoubtedly bizarre or preposterous to nonreaders but perfectly understandable to book lovers and which is in fact articulated by a secondary character in another of Caputo's stories, when an archivist says of the dead people she researches that after a time they “become alive” to her.
The specific occasion for the remark is her discussion with the protagonist about the long-dead poet Ezra Pound, whom the protagonist, a blocked writer, has come to her for help in learning something about. And while Pound doesn’t literally come alive for the protagonist, he does appear in a visitation in which he delivers the assertion that while “light from heaven” or “fire of the gods” may be what makes for true greatness in poets, it’s more just plain persistence or “technique” that’s required for lesser poets to bring to fruition their visions.
A message of particular significance it makes for the blocked protagonist, coming as it does from so renowned an artist. Indeed, the story turns on the notion of a door behind which events of such moment occurred for Pound that, in the protagonist’s words, they “changed the course of modern literature.” More metaphorical than actual, though, the door (which is not to say it didn’t actually exist), with it representing, as I took it, a figurative portal into the wellspring of creativity, and making the story the most overtly literary of Caputo’s collection and the most intriguing for me as a fellow writer.
Satisfying enough, though, the other stories are as straight adventures – the one, for instance, in which a sea captain has good reason to be suspicious of a man seeking a position on the captain’s upcoming voyage which will in fact come to a nasty end, and the most viscerally compelling of the stories for me, the one in which the protagonist, a wildlife photographer, accompanies a doctoral student, again a strong female, into the African bush to research lions, a voyage which will also come to an untimely end.
All in all, a worthy compilation of fiction, Caputo’s latest, and particularly with the Vietnam stories, evocative for me of the best of his earlier works, of course his much-vaunted Vietnam memoir, “A Rumor Of War,” and, still to my mind his overall best, his first novel, “Horn of Africa.”
Married to the story’s Vietnam-veteran protagonist, she is unsettled enough by something she learns about that he participated in during the war that it has him fearing that she might want to end the marriage and me thinking that it would have been interesting to have gotten the story wholly from her viewpoint, perhaps starting a few years before with her growing apprehension as she picks up bit by bit on something that’s eating at him and culminating in the moment when she gets the full truth of what happened.
And while a female in another of the stories, this one a couple of degrees more removed from the protagonist, never does learn the exact details of what happened to her MIA brother (she’s shielded from the actual truth by the protagonist, whom she has enlisted to find out what happened and who comes to know the circumstances all too well), here too I found myself wondering what it might have been like to have gotten the story from her viewpoint, starting with when she was first notified of the brother’s missing status and continuing with her growing anxiety as she imagines the full range of things that might have happened.
Presumptuous as all hell, of course, my imagining alternative ways in which the stories might have been presented, like a character in Robert Stone’s “Dog Soldiers” who tells the novelist protagonist of a preferred direction he’d have liked to see the protagonist’s novel take and is told that that would have made for a different story. But a mark of very good fiction, it seems to me, and very good fiction these stories are, is that the characters become real enough that they do come to exist for a reader independent of the novel, a notion undoubtedly bizarre or preposterous to nonreaders but perfectly understandable to book lovers and which is in fact articulated by a secondary character in another of Caputo's stories, when an archivist says of the dead people she researches that after a time they “become alive” to her.
The specific occasion for the remark is her discussion with the protagonist about the long-dead poet Ezra Pound, whom the protagonist, a blocked writer, has come to her for help in learning something about. And while Pound doesn’t literally come alive for the protagonist, he does appear in a visitation in which he delivers the assertion that while “light from heaven” or “fire of the gods” may be what makes for true greatness in poets, it’s more just plain persistence or “technique” that’s required for lesser poets to bring to fruition their visions.
A message of particular significance it makes for the blocked protagonist, coming as it does from so renowned an artist. Indeed, the story turns on the notion of a door behind which events of such moment occurred for Pound that, in the protagonist’s words, they “changed the course of modern literature.” More metaphorical than actual, though, the door (which is not to say it didn’t actually exist), with it representing, as I took it, a figurative portal into the wellspring of creativity, and making the story the most overtly literary of Caputo’s collection and the most intriguing for me as a fellow writer.
Satisfying enough, though, the other stories are as straight adventures – the one, for instance, in which a sea captain has good reason to be suspicious of a man seeking a position on the captain’s upcoming voyage which will in fact come to a nasty end, and the most viscerally compelling of the stories for me, the one in which the protagonist, a wildlife photographer, accompanies a doctoral student, again a strong female, into the African bush to research lions, a voyage which will also come to an untimely end.
All in all, a worthy compilation of fiction, Caputo’s latest, and particularly with the Vietnam stories, evocative for me of the best of his earlier works, of course his much-vaunted Vietnam memoir, “A Rumor Of War,” and, still to my mind his overall best, his first novel, “Horn of Africa.”
November 8, 2025
A new book by Philip Caputo is always a cause for celebration. This collection of six short stories is connected by protagonists seeking to understand their past and possibly a chart a way into a future. The locales vary from the jungles of SE Asia, the plains of Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and even the Midwest. Descriptions of place and characters make each story unique and unsettling. These are men who cannot go forward without glancing back. Highly recommended. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this title.
October 23, 2025
Had a pleasure of being able to read this on netgallery and all a can say is this was a really nice book to read from start to finish.
Chapters were long but I did enjoy that as the characters showed how the story played out, throughout this book.
I really did enjoy this one and I hope to find more from this author in the future.
Chapters were long but I did enjoy that as the characters showed how the story played out, throughout this book.
I really did enjoy this one and I hope to find more from this author in the future.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews