Book Club: A Stranger in the Kingdom by Howard Frank Mosher

Madison Books hosts an in-person Book Club meeting every month at 6:30 p.m., usually but not always on the last Thursday. Drop in to chat with your neighbors about some of the best books of this or any moment. All readers are welcome--you don't need to sign up in advance, but registering here will help us plan for the right number of attendees. Meetings are held at Parlour Wines, around the corner from the bookstore and across the street from the Madison Park tennis courts.

While most book clubs focus on the hottest current releases, we're doing something a little different. We'll be exploring narratives of New England and the Maritime Provinces, both contemporary and historical, fictional and nonfictional. Some you'll certainly have heard of, maybe even already read and loved, but others may be serendipitous discoveries. We have a list we're pretty excited about, and we hope you will be, too!

Our July selection is by Howard Frank Mosher.

This novel of M**der and its aftermath in a small Vermont town in the 1950s is "reminiscent of To K*ll a Mockingbird...Absorbing" (New York Times).
In Kingdom County, Vermont, the town's new Presbyterian minister is a black man, an unsettling fact for some of the locals. When a French-Canadian woman takes refuge in his parsonage--and is subsequently murdered--suspicion immediately falls on the clergyman. While his thirteen-year-old son struggles in the shadow of the town's accusations, and his older son, a lawyer, fights to defend him, a father finds himself on trial more for who he is than for what he might have done.
"Set in northern Vermont in 1952, Mosher's tale of racism and M**der is powerful, viscerally affecting and totally contemporary in its exposure of deep-seated prejudice and intolerance... [A] big, old-fashioned novel."--Publishers Weekly
"A real mystery in the best and truest sense."--Lee Smith, New York Times Book Review
A Winner of the New England Book Award

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