THE SOUL HUNTERS
The Gulf Harbour Book Club met on April 6 to discuss The Soul Hunters by Christopher Torockio. There were 21 of us in person. For those who weren’t there, you missed a real treat!
Chris is the son-in-law of Club Members Hannah and Allan Sharapan. Hannah did a lovely job presenting the biography of Chris. Here is his info:
Dr. Torockio is the award-winning author of four books of fiction—two novels and two collections of short stories. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, New Orleans Review, Willow Springs, West Branch and other publications. Four of his stories were awarded Pushcart Prize Special mentions. He earned his M.F.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Contemporary Fiction from Western Michigan University.
Dr. Torockio has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Center and the Wesleyan Writers Conference. His teaching interest lies in fiction writing and contemporary fiction. His publications are The Soul Hunters a novel (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), The Truth at Daybreak stories (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2008) and Floating Holidays a novel (Black Lawrence Press, 2007).
I must add that Chris is a most charming person. I can’t wait to meet him when he visits his in-laws.
Here is what other authors wrote about the book.
PRAISE
“The Soul Hunters took me entirely out of my own life and then very artfully led me back into it. This writer’s way with time and with people in time, through the window of a single day and night, is as involving as it is by turns moving and funny, too. The compression of incident and emotion, and the psychology of this family, these sons and their lost father, had me from the start. One lives in this book; one’s sense of felt life is enhanced without quite seeing how it is brought off. A magic show, the thing first rate fiction always provides.”
-Richard Bausch, author of Before, During, After
“The Soul Hunters is rich with character, incident, and humanity. This nuanced, multi-layered, and multi-generational novel is utterly engrossing, and all the characters, from the three brothers who have recently lost their father, the wives of these brothers, to the father himself (who we meet in flashback), are so movingly and skillfully drawn. There’s also a lot of humor and mischief in these pages. What a damn fine novel Chris Torockio has given us.”
-Christine Sneed, author of Little Known Facts and Paris, He Said
Chris Torockio has written a novel of great depth, insight, and expansiveness. A patriarch’s death shakes loose from his three middle-aged sons and their spouses the secrets they have kept even from themselves, and over one long day and night a history and present realign to give this family a chance to survive. The subject matter of this novel is life-and-death serious, but Torockio leavens it with humor and absurdity. He is a master of structure, character, plot, and point-of-view, and he employs them all in service of wisdom, maturity and rich storytelling.”
-Tim Parrish, author of The Jumper and Fear and What Follows
The Gulf Harbour Book Club meets on the first Monday of each month in the Fitness Center at noon. If you want to join the Book Club email [email protected]. Zoom is available for Members if the author allows it. We had 9 authors lined up for the 2025/2026 season. We already had Kristen Harmel, Jane Yang and Abi Dare and Zelly Ruskin, Kate Quinn and Bernhard Schlink. January was Bernhardt Schlinke. March was Theo of Golden, April was Chris Torockio for The Soul Hunters. There are no more authors on Zoom until next September. The May book is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.
