Tom's newest book is The Substance of Things Hoped For: A Novel (Slant Books, 2021).

For a short stint in mid-nineteenth century Oneida, New York, troubled soul and soon-to-be presidential assassin Charles Guiteau threw in his lot with John Humphrey Noyes’s fervent, utopian community of "free love" Perfectionists. In The Substance of Things Hoped For, Tom Noyes, a distant relative of John Humphrey Noyes, builds on this point of historical intersection in deftly imagining the dynamics and consequences of this ominous and unusual relationship. As Guiteau meanders further into madness and eventually achieves infamy for his murder of President Garfield, John Humphrey Noyes is forced to face the consequences of his own missteps and misunderstandings as he makes his exit from Oneida. Joining Noyes and Guiteau in their parallel narratives are a chorus of other characters—family members, lovers, rivals, notable historical figures—whose haunting voices complement, undermine, complicate, and enhance Noyes’s and Guiteau’s respective versions of events, while also homing in on the novel’s most pressing questions, those related to revelation, delusion, loyalty, and love. 

Praise for The Substance of Things Hoped For:

“Narrated by a chorus of arresting voices, this remarkably beautiful novel is a fascinating exploration of faith, an excavation of history, and an evocation of the desires and debates that can both weave together and unravel a community.” 

—Caitlin Horrocks, author of The Vexations

“You can't reimagine and reanimate a history this vividly, memorably, hilariously, and wrenchingly without knowing it, understanding it, deep in your bones. You can't do it without being a writer of dazzling gifts, either. The Substance of Things Hoped For is, quite simply, a brilliant novel.”

—Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson

“The past is the present in Tom Noyes’s The Substance of Things Hoped For. Faith, family, fate, freedom: Noyes’s always lively nineteenth-century tale shows us who we were then in convincing historical detail while simultaneously reminding us in powerful chunks of chiseled prose of who we are today. An engrossing novel.”

—Ray Robertson, author of How to Die: A Book about Being Alive

“It's hard enough for a writer to pilot us through the lives of their characters, but what Tom Noyes manages to do with the ache and pull of time, not to mention the human elements of love, hope, despair, faith, and loss, is nothing short of an incredible achievement. The Substance of Things Hoped For is an awe-inspiring work and we are all the better for having it.”

—Jared Yates Sexton, author of The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

For Behold Faith and Other Stories:

“Tom Noyes’s Behold Faith and Other Stories is dominated by macabre wit and startling confessions of frailty and delusion.”

–The New York Times Book Review

“Noyes distills to a startling, lyrical essence the lot of plain folks…. The tragic and the heroic on the scale of the everyday, with characters so human that they seem utterly recognizable.”

—Kirkus Reviews “Starred Review”

“Characters as real as your neighbors, situations as dire as those between your ears.”

—Lee K. Abbott, author of Wet Places at Noon

For Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories:

“The smart, sharply-written Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories conjures absurdity and pathos in undeniably American landscapes [and] offers a large and irresistible vision, its great empathy shot through with comic insight, its voices keen and energetic, the stories wonderfully surprising.”

—Nancy Reisman, author of The First Desire

“Tom Noyes’s Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories is wonderfully wry and compassionate, and, yes, spooky.” 

–Dan Chaon, author of Ill Will

For Come by Here: A Novella and Stories:

“Tom Noyes’s Come by Here squared me up and speared me in the chest. In these masterful tales, tornadoes billow out of smokestacks, strikingly real characters stand at the crossroads of the promised land and the broken promise, God moves on the water, and the truth comes black-eyed in the Devil's night.”  

–Glenn Taylor, author of A Hanging at Cedar Bottom

“These accomplished stories braid environmental issues with emotional conflicts in a collection so polished I can only marvel at it. Wildly comic, sometimes serious, Noyes unmasks the lies people tell themselves, and the earth itself conspires to shake the foundations of the lives of these hapless but good men and women.”

—Kathleen George, author of The Johnstown Girls

“This is a remarkable collection of narrative voices, of recalcitrant and uncomfortable souls trying to talk into existence the lives they want. But life, these talkers learn, is a stubborn thing.”

—Darrell Spencer, author of Caution: Men in Trees