New to I Love Libraries! We’re pleased to announce that each week we’ll be featuring a new book review from our friends at Booklist, the American Library Association’s nationally distributed book and media review publication.
Since 1905, Booklist has published thousands of book and audiobook reviews each year, helping library and education workers decide what to buy and how to guide patrons and students of all ages in choosing what to read, view, or listen to.
We’re proud to share these reviews with you each week. If you’d like to read more—along with must-read lists, author interviews, and top reading recommendations for adults, youth, and audiobook lovers—you can enjoy a free subscription to Booklist Reader, Booklist’s magazine for library patrons, as a benefit of becoming a Supporter of the American Library Association. What could be better?
For our first installment, we have Bill Kelly’s new review of Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Caputo’s “Wandering Souls and Other Stories,” first published in the December 1, 2025, issue of Booklist. If you’re digging what you’re reading, look for Caputo’s work at your local library, bookstore, or wherever you like to check out (or listen to) books.
Enjoy.
“Wandering Souls and Other Stories”
By Philip Caputo
January 2026. 192p. Arcade, $27.99 (9781648211584); e-book (9781648211591).
Pulitzer Prize–winner Caputo has written sensitively nuanced portrayals of war, trauma, memory, and guilt for decades. His short fiction offers an ideal vehicle for exploring Caputo’s primary strength, his mapping of the complex yet reptilian brain of the human male. In the title story, an epic in miniature, a war veteran and former medic returns to Vietnam to locate the remains of a fellow soldier. In “A Near-Death Experience,” an aging wildlife photographer becomes smitten with a young, raven-haired researcher while on assignment in Africa, leading him to make questionable choices. In another adventurous yarn, Captain Kirby must navigate an old ship through a treacherous Caribbean storm while a new crewmate tells a tale about a valuable Mayan jade statue. A retired couple takes an excursion to Vietnam, where the husband faces demons and long-buried remorse for an atrocity he committed decades earlier. A former foreign service officer takes a mystical side trip to a jungle temple, where things feel eerily surreal. Each story features Caputo’s Hemingwayesque prose as he combines history and imagination in a mosaic of haunted consciousness. Caputo brilliantly examines the lingering moral and psychological costs of conflict, in which memory functions as both wound and tether. A searing yet deeply compassionate story collection that explores the fragile borders between survival, guilt, and redemption.— Bill Kelly
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