Howard Frank Mosher is one of America's most acclaimed writers. His fiction, set in the world of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, chronicles the intertwining family histories of the natives, wanderers, outcasts, and fugitives-white, Native American, escaped slaves fleeing north, French Canadians, and others-who settled in this remote and beautiful place. God's Kingdom explores the Kinneson family through the coming of age of the heir, Jim, and its rich and complicated history. Earnest and innocent, a bright high school student, Jim grows curious about the unspoken "trouble in the family" that haunts his father, a small-town newspaper editor, and his grandfather, a raconteur who keeps the Kinnesons' secrets to himself. Layer by layer, tale by tale, sorting out fact from deliberately obscured legend, Jim explores the Kinnesons' long relationship with others in the Kingdom, culminating in a discovery that forever changes his life and place in that world. Beginning with a...

A vivid portrait of a young man's coming of age in an America that is almost gone, Waiting for Teddy Williams has been hailed by Ernest Hebert as "ranking with Huckleberry Finn in heart, spirit, and insight into the American character." The book begins on the eighth birthday of Ethan "E.A." Allen in the remote village of Kingdom Common, Vermont. Noted for its fervent, if unrequited, devotion to the Boston Red Sox, the village sports a replica of Fenway Park's Green Monster on top of the local baseball bat factory. Here, in a region that lags decades behind the rest of New England, E.A. lives with his honky-tonk mother, Gypsy Lee, and the acid-tongued Gran, wheelchair-bound since the Sox's heart-wrenching playoff loss to the Yankees in 1978. Homeschooled, fatherless, and living on the wrong side of the tracks, E.A. is an outcast in his own town. Haunted by a dark mystery in his family's past, he has only one close friend to talk it over with, a statue of his namesake on...

Winner of the New England Book Award, Howard Frank Mosher's endearing first novel is both a heroic adventure and a thrilling coming-of-age story. It is the memorable tale of a young man named Wild Bill Bonhomme, his larger-than-life father, Quebec Bill, and their whiskey-smuggling exploits along the Vermont-Canada border in 1932. On an epic journey through the wilderness, Bill and his father encounter a cast of wild characters—and live out magical escapades as they carve their way into legend.

From bestselling, nationally celebrated author Howard Frank Mosher, a wildly funny and deeply personal account of his three-month, 20,000-mile sojourn to discover what he loved enough to live for.Several months before novelist Howard Frank Mosher turned sixty-five, he learned that he had prostate cancer. Following forty-six intensive radiation treatments, Mosher set out alone in his twenty-year-old Chevy Celebrity on a monumental road trip and book tour across twenty-first-century America. From a chance meeting with an angry moose in northern New England to late-night walks on the wildest sides of America's largest cities, The Great Northern Express chronicles Mosher's escapades with an astonishing array of erudite bibliophiles, homeless hitchhikers, country crooners and strippers, and aspiring writers of all circumstances. Full of high and low comedy and rollicking adventures, this is part travel memoir, part autobiography, and pure, anarchic fun. From...

In the spring of 1804, Private True Teague Kinneson—schoolmaster, inventor, playwright, and explorer—sets out with his nephew, Ticonderoga, to race Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Pacific. Along the way True and Ti encounter Daniel Boone and his six-foot-two spinster daughter, Flame Danielle; fight and trick a renegade army out to stop Lewis's expedition; invent baseball with the Nez Perce; hold a high-stakes rodeo with Sacagawea's Shoshone relatives; and outwit True's lifelong adversary, the Gentleman from Vermont, a.k.a. the devil himself. And when a beautiful and mysterious Blackfoot girl named Yellow Sage Flower Who Tells Wise Stories enters the tale, things start to get really interesting. The True Account, which Lawrence Millman calls "part riotous adventure, part book of wonders, and part historical travesty," is the hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking story of a man "whose imagination is unfettered by either convention or fact,...

Howard Frank Mosher has earned both critical acclaim and a wide readership for his vivid historical portraits of northern New England residents in his fictional Kingdom County, Vermont. A Stranger in the Kingdom tells the unforgettable story of a brutal murder in a small town and the devastating events that follow. The town's new preacher, a black man, finds himself on trial more for who he is than for what he might have done in this powerful drama of passion, prejudice, and innocence suddenly lost . . . and perhaps found again.

The rugged and mysterious mountains of Kingdom County are the setting for Howard Frank Mosher's brilliant new autobiographical novel, The Fall of the Year. Like Mosher's acclaimed earlier novels, The Fall of the Year celebrates the fiercely independent people of Kingdom Common, including such memorable new characters as Foster Boy Dufresne, the local bottle picker and metaphysical savant; the incomparably strange clairvoyant and matchmaker, Louvia the Fortuneteller; Dr. Sam E. Rong, a wayfaring Chinese herbalist and connoisseur of human nature; the itinerant vaudevillian mind reader, Mr. Moriarity Mentality, who uses his unusual powers to teach the town fathers a lesson they will never forget; and the daredevil tomboy, Molly Murphy, who risks her life twice in a single day to fulfill her dream of running away with the Last Railway Extravaganza and Greatest Little Show on Earth. At the heart of The Fall of the Year are Kingdom County's baseball-playing,...

SUMMARY: A stunning and lyrical Civil War thriller, Walking to Gatlinburg is a spellbinding story of survival, wilderness adventure, mystery, and love in the time of war.Morgan Kinneson is both hunter and hunted. The sharp-shooting 17-year-old from Kingdom County, Vermont, is determined to track down his brother Pilgrim, a doctor who has gone missing from the Union Army. But first Morgan must elude a group of murderous escaped convicts in pursuit of a mysterious stone that has fallen into his possession.It’s 1864, and the country is in the grip of the bloodiest war in American history. Meanwhile, the Kinneson family has been quietly conducting passengers on the Underground Railroad from Vermont to the Canadian border. One snowy afternoon Morgan leaves an elderly fugitive named Jesse Moses in a mountainside cabin for a few hours so that he can track a moose to feed his family. In his absence, Jesse is murdered, and thus begins Morgan’s unforgettable trek south through an apocalyptic landscape of war and mayhem.Along the way, Morgan encounters a fantastical array of characters, including a weeping elephant, a pacifist gunsmith, a woman who lives in a tree, a blind cobbler, and a beautiful and intriguing slave girl named Slidell who is the key to unlocking the mystery of the secret stone. At the same time, he wrestles with the choices that will ultimately define him – how to reconcile the laws of nature with religious faith, how to temper justice with mercy. Magical and wonderfully strange, Walking to Gatlinburg is both a thriller of the highest order and a heartbreaking odyssey into the heart of American darkness.

Set in northern Vermont in 1930, On Kingdom Mountain is the story of Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson. She is a renowned local bookwoman, eccentric bird carver, and the last remaining resident of a wild mountain on the U.S.-Canadian border, now threatened by a proposed new highway. Miss Jane encounters a mysterious stunt pilot and weathermaker when his biplane crashes on a nearby frozen lake. He brings with him a riddle containing clues to the whereabouts of stolen Civil War gold that may have been hidden on Miss Jane's property. As she and the footloose aviator search for the treasure, Miss Jane is confronted by the most important decisions of her life. Featuring daring action scenes and outrageous comedy, along with a passionate, surprising love affair, On Kingdom Mountain is traditional storytelling at its best, rooted in Howard Mosher's own family history and in a way of life on the brink of extinction.

The final book by one of America's most treasured writers.Upon his passing in January 2017, Howard Frank Mosher was recognized as one of America's most acclaimed writers. His fiction set in the world of Vermont's fabled Northeast Kingdom chronicles the intertwining family histories of the natives, wanderers, outcasts, and others who settled in this ethereal place. In its obituary, The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Mosher's fictional Kingdom County, Vt., became his New England version of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County." In Points North, completed just weeks before his death, Mosher presents a brilliant, lovingly-evoked collection of stories that center around the Kinneson family, ranging over decades of their history in the Kingdom. From a loquacious itinerant preacher who beguiles the reticent farmers and shopkeepers of a small New England town, to a proposed dam that threatens the river that Kinneson men have fished for generations, the...

Northern Borders is Mosher's nostalgic novel of life in northern Vermont's Kingdom County, as told by a man remembering his boyhood. In 1948 six-year-old Austen Kittredge III leaves his widowed father to live with his paternal grandparents on their farm in the township of Lost Nation. Escapades at the county fair, doings at the annual family reunion and Shakespeare performance, and conflicts at the one-room schoolhouse are all recounted lovingly in this enchanting coming-of-age story filled with luminous memories and the deepest of childhood secrets, as a boy is molded into a man.