RiverRun Bookstore and the Portsmouth Public Library present Howard Frank Mosher at the Levenson Room of the library. Howard will be talking about his new Civil War novel, "Walking to Gatlinburg"..

MARK YOUR CALENDAR
March 7
Portsmouth, NH

Mosher also will present an original slideshow, called "Transforming History into Fiction: the Story of a Born Liar". 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.

In Howard's own words about the slideshow (from his website): "Transforming History into Fiction: the Story of a Born Liar chronicles how I wrote Walking to Gatlinburg, from the surpassingly strange, never-before-told family stories that inspired the novel – including that of my notorious Great, Great, Grandpa Gleason, who met his end while attempting to murder his family – to the several research trips I took to retrace Morgan Kinneson’s epic walk south from the mountains of northern Vermont to the remote coves and hollows of the Great Smokies. (The slide presentation also includes some amusing modern-day images that Morgan did not see on his way south in 1864.)"

PRAISE FOR THE NOVEL

"A Civil War odyssey in the tradition of Charles Frazier’s ‘Cold Mountain’ and Robert Olmstead’s ‘Coal Black Horse’, Mosher’s latest, about a Vermont teenager’s harrowing journey south to find his missing-in-action brother, is old-fashioned in the best sense of the word....The story of Morgan’s rite-of-passage through an American arcadia despoiled by war and slavery is an engrossing tale with mass appeal. – Publisher's Weekly

"We are in the hands of a skilled storyteller, and every word matters. A captivating story, and one that cries for a sequel." – Kirkus, starred review

"[A] haunting and hallucinatory novel....Historical realism this isn’t but it is a violent, often puzzling picaresque with an invigorating take on the Underground Railroad and an unsettling vision of an America despoiled by the War between the States." – Booklist

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten novels and a travel memoir. Born in the Catskill Mountains in 1942, Mosher has lived in Vermont’s fabled Northeast Kingdom since 1964. He has won many awards for his fiction, including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, the American Civil Liberties Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the New England Book Award. Three of his novels, "Disappearances", "A Stranger in the Kingdom" and "Where the Rivers Flow North", have been made into acclaimed feature movies by the Vermont independent filmmaker Jay Craven. Mosher and his wife of forty-four years, Phillis, have a grown son and daughter.