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GOD'S KINGDOM

Howard Frank Mosher

We enter the world of Kingdom County in remote rural Vermont, where our guide is Jim Kinneson, known as “the writer.” Jim is a faithful but questioning chronicler of the local history, which in fact are his family stories because “in the Kingdom, all history was Kinneson family history.

While describing seemingly simple country life and traditions of camping and hunting, fishing and baseball, Jim’s anecdotes reveal surprising tensions and suppressed passions that run through time and his family line. A schoolhouse humiliation forces a young boy, an outsider, to flee into the “murderous” icy cold, and to his death. The story of a lost baseball turns into a discovery of long unrequited love. A basketball game between rival towns turns into a literal death match. The visit of a union organizer starts out with gifts of free baseball hats to the workers at the local furniture factory, but ends in a terrible factory “accident” that may have been no accident at all. Jim quotes the local historian, appropriately named Pliny Templeton, who was a slave who came north, became an educated man, and was himself an outside observer to the ways and people of Kingdom County. Starting with the first white settlers who annihilated the native inhabitants, Pliny’s history—and Jim’s stories—are intertwined, ultimately revealing a family secret. As we come to know the place, Kingdom County emerges as a character that shapes its own inhabitants. Like his protagonist Jim Kinneson, who first appeared in an earlier novel (A Stranger in the Kingdom), Howard Frank Mosher is renowned for his literary portrait of Vermont life. Howard Frank Mosher is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. Mosher has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the New England Book Award, and the 2011 New England Independent Booksellers Association's President's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. Born in the Catskill Mountains, Mosher has lived in Vermont's fabled Northeast Kingdom, "God's Kingdom," since 1964.

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Book Published 2015-10-06 by St. Martin's Press

Comments

He is the rarest thing in literature: an original. Vermont is Mr. Mosher's literary kingdom and he rules it with a bittersweet pen pressed hard to the page.

GOD’S KINGDOM by Howard Frank Mosher is October 2015 pick by independent booksellers.

In his eleventh book of fiction, a novel-in-stories, much-acclaimed Vermont writer Mosher’s thoughtful, clear-eyed unraveling of small-town life, warts and all, is powerful in its simplicity and soaring in its embrace of universal truths. And plucky, bright Jim Kinneson deserves a place in the pantheon of other such laudable young men memorably rendered by the likes of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Tony Earley.

Howard Frank Mosher is an American treasure in the long or short form, or any hybrid between. And guess what: he keeps getting better.

In God's Kingdom Mosher brings us the coming of age of a young writer; along the way we see the kingdom as Jimmy sees it, its harshness, as well its glory, and through the good, the bad, and the ugly is the triumph of the human spirit and the benediction of the landscape upon that spirit. God's Kingdom is one of those fictions that leave the reader uplifted without sacrificing truth, realism, or style.

Mosher writes of a community where blood runs thick with meaning. In “God’s Kingdom,” there are bloodlines, blood feuds, blood ties, bloodshed…. What value there is in the novel comes not from the many morals drawn but from Mosher’s evocation of the land and its strange, almost amoral magic.

...his deep contemplation of local matters provides a lens through which he and his lucky reader can the more keenly know what it is to be human.

This irresistible novel should bring Howard Frank Mosher the big audience his work deserves. Reading God’s Kingdom is like listening to a masterful storyteller around the fire. There’s a man named Moose with a pet moose, an inspiring mute, a brilliant former slave, a basketball phenom named Crazy, a Pulitzer-winning curmudgeon and a spinster who sees the future. These big-hearted stories build artfully upon each other. And along the way, Mosher invents—and often kills—more unforgettable characters in one sprawling family in one slender novel than most writers create in a lifetime. His quirky imagined world is tinged with whimsy and magic yet utterly convincing, as if these pages sprang from the soil of northern Vermont.

The ghosts of history, alongside a landscape that appears to nurture, while in fact being careless of our existence, run side by side throughout the novel and in the end, we are left with the pause of beauty, the moment of grace, the relentless swelling of hope. A rare achievement in contemporary American letters.

These 12 chapters — set in the 1950s — chart the life of one boy from age 14, when he kills his first deer, to age 18, when he finds true love and goes off to college. This narrative arc makes it a coming-of-age story in the traditional mold, but the depth and range of Mosher’s commitment to his material elevates it to something more.

Over the years Mosher's beloved Vermont "Kingdom" has become one of America's most magical literary places.

We are just plain lucky that Howard Frank Mosher has written so deeply and in the end invented Vermont, this version, so far north that the border runs through it; and he is able in this rich coming-of-age story to invoke the humane spirit of Sherwood Anderson, who had his own kingdom in Winesburg. This love letter to the North Country brims with the profound natural world and peels back layers of the personal mysteries imbedded in its history. God's Kingdom held me to the last page.

In blackly comic stories, often melancholy or ripe with realism, characters are shaped by a land of isolated beauty… you’ll find a welcome dose of nostalgic realism laced with hard-edged wisdom. Read more...

Each story Mosher tells is infused with the weather, rugged landscape and stoic characters for which he has become famous—and brings the reader closer to the beautiful yet hardscrabble world…

Few writers plumb the cords that link fathers and sons with the hope - and humor - of Howard Frank Mosher. He is wistful and wise, and his moral compass is as precise as his immense skills as a storyteller. I cherish my visits to the mythical Kingdom County that once upon a time was Vermont.

God’s Kingdom is a pleasure and a surprise. It has everything one would expect from a Howard Mosher novel and a lot more, too. It is fun to read, and is filled with adventures, beguiling characters, the presence of the natural world and its beauties, but it is also compelling evidence that Howard Mosher has really just begun. This, I think, is his best book, but that is only because it is his most recent. If you have not read Mosher, the loss is yours. If you have, more pleasure is on the way.

This is American fiction at its very best, a rip-roaring story full of hilarity and heartbreak. I finished it feeling better about myself and life in general. God's Kingdom is the good stuff, the very best stuff, honest and emotionally resonant. Don't miss it.