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Published Jan 2018
208 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
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 scandalous secret of a romance and its violent consequences, and a young man's seemingly fruitless search for love? Points North is a full-hearted, gently-comic, and beautifully-written last gift to the readers who treasure Howard Frank Mosher.
"Mosher's rich language makes art from both history and the quotidian, from bigotry and courage to fishing flies and brook trout." - Publishers Weekly
"This recommended book will appeal to general readers and those who appreciate family stories." - Library Journal
"Deceptive in their simplicity, Mosher's stories poignantly illuminate complex themes of loyalty and identity and can rightfully be called American classics." - Booklist
"How bittersweet these last, wonderful Points North stories are, and how they intensify the loss of Howard Frank Mosher, one of our most beloved and sure-footed storytellers ... Back one last time with the man who gave these people and this place such rich, abundant, glorious life." - Richard Russo
"Points North will be our final visit to Howard Frank Mosher's beloved northeast corner of Vermont, a remote swath of land he christened Kingdom County. But like Mosher himself, this book's moral compass is spot-on, the characters eccentric and original, the stories ranging from heartbreaking to hilarious. This book is a gift: Mosher saved the best for last." - Chris Bohjalian, author of The Sleepwalker and The Guest Room
"This splendid collection from Howard Frank Mosher shows his signature narrative gifts.…The lives of the Kinneson family, in all of their hardscrabble joys, sorrows, and romantic scandals, compose wonderful rural dramas. These stories have the historical and emotional dimensions of Hardy's Wessex Tales. Mosher elevates literature to that high a level of regard." - Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist and Next Life Might Be Kinder
"Points North is beautiful, smart, poignant, and funny, all written in the inimitable voice of one of America's greatest storytellers." - Thomas Christopher Greene, author of If I Forget You and The Headmaster's Wife
"There's a delightful circularity and gemlike clarity to Howard Frank Mosher's final gift to American letters ... A stunning, and for many of us, heartbreaking, culmination for one of the most unique of American writers." - Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall and Before We Sleep
This information about Points North was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
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Photo: Linda Ramsdell
Howard Frank Mosher was the author of eleven novels and two memoirs. He was honored with the New England Independent Booksellers Association's President's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts and was the recipient of the Literature Award bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His novel A Stranger in the Kingdom won the New England Book Award for fiction and was later made into a movie, as were his novels Disappearances and Where the Rivers Flow North.
He died aged 74 in January 2017.
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