Points North

“Mosher’s stories poignantly illuminate complex themes of loyalty and identity and can rightfully be called American classics.” —Booklist

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.

“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. One last time then, back to Kingdom County, the now mythic landscape that Howard made inseparable from those who lived there, the Kinnesons and Pliny Templeton, and all the rest who filled and broke our hearts.” —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author