A THOUSAND SOULS
A NOVEL IN STORIES
The fourteen stories in Catherine Tudish’s gorgeously crafted volume interweave the lives of three generations in this “embarassingly pretty town” of “upward of a thousand souls” as they inevitably touch the outside world. A boy born of a secret affair travels by train to South Carolina for a first-time meeting with his respected father. A beloved sheriff breaks up a drug operation, only to get busted himself for helping undocumented workers evade ICE. The disappointed wife of a rural mail driver presents him with a nude portait—of herself. A shy girl with a speech impediment loses her stutter when she befriends and speaks to a black bear.
Even as their loyalties and traditions are tested through loss, betrayal, and startling discovery, the characters in A Thousand Souls embody the belonging that comes from a close-knit community. Sharply observed, wry, and deeply tender, these stories resonate with both the intricacy and cost of interconnection as the years pass, and ordinary lives take unexpected turns.
Praise for A Thousand Souls
“What a wonderful writer Catherine Tudish is and what a marvelous novel in stories she has written, so mysterious, so complicated, so beautiful. As one story opens into the next—a girl tames a bear, a boy briefly meets his father, a young woman takes French lessons, a sheriff loses his job—the web of connections, and our sense of this very particular place in rural Vermont, deepens. A Thousand Souls offers the deepest of reading pleasures: the experience of lives lived over time, and the secret sorrows and joys of the community.”
--Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven
“Catherine Tudish’s A Thousand Souls is the work of a born storyteller, a writer’s writer, with the evidence shining forth on every page. There’s a marvelous sense of place at work here, and a deep understanding of the human heart. A Thousand Souls is why good fiction still matters.”
--W.D. Wetherell, author of A Century of November and Chekhov’s Sister
Published by Acre Books, University of Cincinnati, April 2026