The Fall Of The Year - Softcover

Mosher, Howard Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618082360 ISBN 13: 9780618082360

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2000

Synopsis

Set in the beautiful mountains of Kingdom County, THE FALL OF THE YEAR is Howard Frank Mosher's brilliant autobiographical novel about 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. Here are the lively stories of the eccentric inhabitants of Kingdom County, including Louvia the Fortuneteller; Foster Boy Dufresne, the local bottle picker; and the daredevil tomboy Molly Murphy, who risks her life to fulfill her dream of running away with the Greatest Little Show on Earth. Mosher's kingdom is "timeless. It existed well before man, has survived his spell upon it, and will do so long after the curtain has fallen" (Washington Post Book World).

About this title

Review:

In his novels Northern Borders and A Stranger in the Kingdom, Howard Frank Mosher has displayed a magical command of New England's terrain, not to mention its rustic inhabitants. The Fall of the Year finds him at it again, waving his writer's wand over a tiny section of the north woods. His narrator, Frank Bennett, has returned home to Kingdom Common, Vermont, after graduating from college during the late 1950s. Despite the impending construction of a nearby ski resort, this minuscule village remains as bucolic as ever:

Truth to tell, few of the three hundred or so Commoners who lived in the village proper had the slightest inclination in downhill skiing anyway. Our principal recreations were still trout fishing and deer hunting, and they were both very good indeed.

It's the Commoners--particularly the more eccentric ones--who make up the heart of Mosher's novel. Frank devotes one chapter to the village's grumbling fortuneteller; another to a fiercely entrepreneurial jack-of-all-trades; and a third to a beautiful baker's assistant, with whom he'd clearly like more than a casual, yarn-spinning relationship. But the true personification of the place would have to be Frank's adoptive parent, Father George Lecouer. When this ex-whiskey smuggler turned priest isn't laboring at his 3,000-page History of Kingdom County, he's dispensing advice to the narrator and setting various bits of small-town havoc in motion. Though some of Frank's tales are predictable, most evince the storyteller's gift for consistent surprise--which makes this Kingdom Common saga an uncommonly fine work of fiction. --Rucker Alex

About the Author:

HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten books, including Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account, and A Stranger in the Kingdom, which, along with Disappearances, was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0618082360
• ISBN 13: 9780618082360
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288