Howard Frank Mosher Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Disappearances (1977)
  2. Marie Blythe (1983)
  3. A Stranger in the Kingdom (1989)
  4. Northern Borders (1994)
  5. The Fall of the Year (1999)
  6. The True Account (2003)
  7. Waiting for Teddy Williams (2004)
  8. On Kingdom Mountain (2007)
  9. Walking to Gatlinburg (2010)
  10. God’s Kingdom (2015)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Points North (2018)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. North Country (1997)
  2. The Great Northern Express (2012)

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Howard Frank Mosher Books Overview

Disappearances

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.

Marie Blythe

Howard Frank Mosher is one of the best loved writers of northern New England, one who has ‘created a literary landscape as textured as anything produced by the U. S. Geological Survey,’ according to USA Today. His ‘greatest gift,’ says the Washington Post, is ‘his talent for creating lively, living characters.’ One of his most vivid and memorable characters is Marie Blythe. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a young girl with a felicitous name immigrates to Vermont from French Canada. She grows up confronting the grim realities of life with an indomitable spirit nursing victims of a tuberculosis epidemic, enduring a miscarriage alone in the wilderness, and coping with the uncertainties of love. In Marie Blythe, Mosher has created a strong minded, passionate, and truly memorable hero*ine.

A Stranger in the Kingdom

Murder wasn’t the only crime this town would never forget. Kingdom County, Vermont, is tucked between the Green Mountains and the White Mountains not far from the Canadian border a small town of proud people with ling memories. When the preacher, Walt Andrews, came to town, he was an outsider, a stranger. He was also a black man. It was the summer James Kinneson turned thirteen. Son of the newspaper owner and younger brother of the town’s fiery defense lawyer, James witnessed the shattering events that would tear the town apart a brutal murder and the trial of a man, not so much for what he might have done, but for what he was. A Stranger in the Kingdom is a powerful drama of passion, prejudice, and innocence suddenly lost and perhaps found again.

Northern Borders

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.

The Fall of the Year

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, trout fishing ‘unorthodox priest,’ Father George Lecoeur, his adopted son and proteg , Frank Bennett, and two interlocking love stories unlike any others in contemporary fiction. Written in Howard Frank Mosher’s distinctively wry and ironical voice, with the straight ahead narrative action that characterizes all his fiction, The Fall of the Year is a celebration of love in all its forms, from friendship to the most passionate romance, in a place where family, community, vocation, and the natural world still matter profoundly.

The True Account

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, whose hopefulness and good nature yield to no force, and whose ways and stays rank second to none in the history of the world.’

Waiting for Teddy Williams

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 the village green. Into the world of the Allen family comes a drifter named Teddy, who is determined to do one decent thing in his life by teaching E.A. everything he knows about baseball. As E.A. grows up and learns the secrets of the game, we get to know Kingdom Common and its flinty, colorful people. We also meet the incomparable manager of the Red Sox, the Legendary Spence, ‘the winningest big league manager never to win a World Series,’ and his macaw, Curse of the Bambino. When the Sox s new owner vows to move the team to Hollywood if they lose the Series again, Spence, his pitching corps decimated by injuries, has to take a chance on a young nobody from Vermont.

On Kingdom Mountain

Set in northern Vermont in 1930, On Kingdom Mountain introduces us to Miss Jane Hubbell Kinneson. A renowned local bookwoman and eccentric bird carver, she is the last remaining resident of a wild mountain on the U.S. Canadian border, now threatened by a proposed new highway known as the Connector. On her fiftieth birthday, a mysterious stunt pilot and weathermaker enters her life when his biplane crashes on the frozen lake at the foot of her mountain. He brings with him a riddle handed down from his grandfather containing clues to the whereabouts of $100,000 in stolen Civil War gold that may have been hidden on Miss Jane’s property. As she and the footloose aviator begin to search for the treasure, Miss Jane finds herself confronted by the most important decisions of her life. Featuring daring action scenes and outrageous comedy, along with a passionate and surprising love affair, On Kingdom Mountain represents traditional storytelling at its best, rooted deeply in Howard Mosher’s own family history and in a way of life on the brink of extinction.

Walking to Gatlinburg

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. From the Hardcover edition.

Points North

Howard Frank Mosher embarked on a journey following America’s northern border from coast to coast in search of the country’s last unspoiled frontiers. What he discovered was a vast and sparsely settled territory largely ignored by the rest of the United States and Canada; a harsh and beautiful region populated by some of the continent’s most independent men and women. Mosher brings the remote North Country vividly to life, and reflects on the powerful characters he has encountered in his own life and how this land has shaped his life and his books.

North Country

Howard Frank Mosher embarked on a journey following America’s northern border from coast to coast in search of the country’s last unspoiled frontiers. What he discovered was a vast and sparsely settled territory largely ignored by the rest of the United States and Canada; a harsh and beautiful region populated by some of the continent’s most independent men and women. Mosher brings the remote North Country vividly to life, and reflects on the powerful characters he has encountered in his own life and how this land has shaped his life and his books.

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