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The rugged and mysterious mountains of Kingdom County are the setting for Howard Frank Mosher's brilliant autobiographical novel, The Fall of the Year. Like Mosher's acclaimed earlier novels, The Fall of the Year celebrates the fiercely independent people of Kingdom Country, including such memorable new characters as Foster Boy Dufresne, the local bottle picker and metaphysical savant; the incomparably strange clairvoyant and matchmaker, Louvia the Fortuneteller; Dr. Sam E. Rong, a wayfaring Chinese herbalist and connoisseur of human nature; the itinerant vaudevillian mind reader, Mr. Moriarty Mentality, who uses his unusual powers to teach the town fathers a lesson they will never forget; and the daredevil tomboy, Molly Murphy, who risks her life twice in a single day to fulfill her dream of running away with the Last Railway Extravaganza and the Greatest Little Show on Earth. At the heart of In the Fall of the Year are Kingdom County's baseball-playing, trout fishing "unorthodox priest," Father George Lecoeur, his adopted son and protege, Frank Bennett, and two interlocking love stories unlike any others in contemporary fiction.

The time: 1932, just before the repeal of Prohibition and just shy of Wild Bill's fourteenth birthday. The place: Vermont, near the Canadian border. Bill's Dad, desperate to preserve the cattle herd through a bitter winter, resorts to whiskey-smuggling, a traditional family occupation. He takes his son on a voyage that will remain etched in the reader's mind: a journey into the vast reaches of the Canadian wilderness and into a demonic and spellbinding past. What they find is the genuine stuff of legends.