The Great Northern Express: A Writer's Journey Home

Just before he turned 65, acclaimed novelist Mosher (Walking to Gatlinburg) learned that he had prostate cancer. During the course of his radiation therapy, he decides to embark on a cross-country road trip that he and his long-deceased uncle had once dreamed of taking. A week after his final radiation treatment, which coincides with the publication of his new novel, Mosher sets out on the Great American Book Tour in his 20-year-old Chevy Celebrity (the Loser Cruiser), which has 280,000 miles on the odometer, stopping at America’s great independent bookstores in cities both large and small. Mosher colorfully weaves stories about his teaching in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont with his misadventures in the Loser Cruiser, cheap hotels, and at readings and book signings to create a brilliantly vibrant quilt that covers us with his warmth, humor, and love of discovery, reading, and writing. In 65 short installments, Mosher regales us with rollicking tales of his encounter with an angry mother moose in a motel parking lot, the high school principal (the Prof) he worked for who measured his days in quarts of beer (a two-quart day was a bad one), and his conversion to cross-country skiing. Mosher admits that there’s no place he’d rather hang out than a bookstore or a library, and he affectionately introduces us to some of America’s greatest bookstores, including Square Books in Oxford, Miss.; the Tattered Cover in Denver; and Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., among others. With vivacious humor, Mosher carries readers along on this adventure that offers him a chance to gain a fresh perspective on what he loves enough to live for. (Mar.)