The fictional town of Neptune could be dozens of places in Vermont. It has a population of 1,043 and “fourteen white clapboard houses and a white church surrounding the village green,” according to the mail carrier who narrates the title story in Catherine Tudish’s new book, A Thousand Souls.
Those souls are the subject of this “novel in stories” from the central Vermont author, known for her 2005 story collection Tenney’s Landing and her 2007 novel American Cream. While not all of the 14 stories in Tudish’s latest work take place in Neptune, all focus on its residents, adding up to a larger narrative of intertwined lives.
Many literary portraits of small towns give pride of place to the angst or depravity hiding under the placid surface. A Thousand Souls, by contrast, features little dramatic heightening or sustained conflict. These people’s lives are genuinely quiet, yet Tudish makes that quietness resonate profoundly.
Typical of her subtle approach, the title story — the first to give us an overview of Neptune — doesn’t appear until about halfway through the book. In it, mail carrier Stewart Prime, the novel’s most contemplative narrator, muses on the strange course of his life:
I drive a rural mail route, which gives me a lot of time to think. Lately I’ve been thinking about how a tiny thing — a worn-out gear, say, or a word misspoken — can change a person’s life forever.
The theme of great change arising from “tiny things” has obvious relevance to both Stewart’s life — he was orphaned by a freak Ferris wheel accident — and those of many folks on his daily route. Rather than open the novel on that book club-friendly motif, however, Tudish allows us to discover it for ourselves first.
Her storytelling method is one in which emotion accumulates almost imperceptibly until it snowballs (snow is another frequent motif) into our awareness. Case in point: We may initially be underwhelmed by the first story in A Thousand Souls, “Keepsake,” a man’s reminiscence of meeting his dad for the first time as a boy. Isaiah Collier’s discovery that he was born from a fleeting affair — his father has a family down South — supplies the boy’s first knowledge of “love, what it can give you and what it can take away.”
But that simple revelation develops more dimensions in the fourth story, “Wish You Were Here.” Here, the protagonist is Isaiah’s aunt in Baltimore; grieving her brother, she finds letters that unearth the existence of his out-of-wedlock son. Wondering whether to tell the widow, she reflects that “It was terrible to know about [the letters] and say nothing, more terrible to reveal them.” The novel’s last story, “The Weight of Snow,” serves as a bookend that draws Isaiah’s motif of the giving and taking powers of love to a touching conclusion.
Marital infidelity appears often in A Thousand Souls, as does the question of whether a child’s origin determines the course of their life. (Isaiah becomes a model family man, to the consternation of some Neptune residents.) Death, aging and grief are also well represented. Several stories focus on Isaiah’s friend Zeb and his symbiotic relationship with his daughter Tory — both perhaps what we’d now call neurodivergent — as they grapple with loves and losses, piecing broken lives back together through patience and routine.
Close-knit as Neptune may be, Tudish has no truck with the myth of Vermont’s insularity. Neptune is no self-contained “tiny kingdom,” as a visitor imagines it in “The Weight of Snow,” but a place that sees frequent departures, arrivals and sentimental returns.
In “A Thousand Souls,” Stewart speaks dismissively of outsiders, as old-time Vermonters are wont to do: “From time to time, a stranger shows up in Neptune. They’re like those birds that get blown off course by hurricanes.” But one big-city transplant (herself the protagonist of another story, “Search and Rescue”) tempts him to alter his beloved routines. Meanwhile, the narrator of “Crossing” envies a childhood friend’s escape from Neptune even as she reflects wryly on her own inability to leave.
Some newcomers hail from farther away, testing the town’s tolerance for newness. In “Twelve Mountains,” the teenage Tory falls in love with a Hmong refugee. In “Catching Sheriff Lightheart,” the town’s well-liked lawman — whose “sheriffing style is what you might call selective,” the narrator notes — helps undocumented farmworkers evade the feds.
The stories are about evenly split between first- and third-person narration, and the shifting keeps us engaged. Two of them experiment with form: “Boy Two” is epistolary, while “Twelve Mountains” features a Greek chorus of town busybodies. Overall, Tudish’s style is notable not for innovation but for accretion: She builds an intricate facsimile of life from soothingly mundane details and secondhand stories that her characters use to make sense of their current dilemmas.
“Catching Sheriff Lightheart,” for instance, traces the evolution of the menu at Neptune’s Red Onion Café. In “Search and Rescue,” we learn why the protagonist’s late husband called certain rural vehicles “shit barges.” In “French Lessons,” the narrator revisits her dad’s family lore in an effort to understand his present behavior.
In more than one story, food has healing and bonding powers. In “The Book of Consolation,” for instance, Isaiah’s mom brings a pie to a recently bereaved mother: “Such a foolish equation, she thinks. You have lost your only child. And here is your pie.” Yet that humble offering makes a difference, paired with a listening ear.
A Thousand Souls is a book for readers who appreciate gentle yet weighty truths.
A Thousand Souls is a book for readers who appreciate such gentle yet weighty truths. The stories’ wealth of details and rapid sliding around in time can make for a dizzying reading experience; I found myself taking notes to keep track of the characters’ web of connections. But it’s a nourishing read, too, as we grow to know these people — and sometimes their ancestors and progeny — better with each reappearance.
Isaiah’s children, for instance, are the focus of “Boy Two,” which consists of a young woman’s revelatory letter to her brother. In a postscript, she declares her intention not to send the missive, wondering if “Maybe I was writing it for myself, after all, to fix us in this place and time.” That’s a fine description of what Tudish’s own stories do: They “fix” their characters in a fictional world that feels poignantly close to our own. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Life on Neptune | Book review: A Thousand Souls, Catherine Tudish”
This article appears in July 15 • 2026.
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