Ask any reader, and they’ll be able to point to a handful of authors whom, once read, always remain with them.

As writers, I think the impact of certain books and authors can be even more profound. There are a few writers whose work have profoundly impacted me not only as a person, but as a writer, transforming how I view the project of a novel and reframing what I believe the written word is capable of.

You know it the minute you put the book down that, although it’s over, it will, like a tree fallen in the woods, provide life and fodder and foundation for much of your thinking and writing for years to come.

I had the great luck recently to stumble upon copies of a few Howard Frank Mosher novels at a local book sale.

I pocketed them at a steal for about $1 each.

I knew of Mosher only from having Googled many years ago “authors from Vermont.” I’m ashamed to say I had assumed at the time that, given Mosher’s age and the setting of his repertoire, that the books would be colloquial and dull.

That assumption is ironic, of course, considering that I have become a writer who, like Mosher, am preoccupied with the simultaneous insularity and universality of a particular place and particular time.

It felt, as I began to read, that these novels were written specifically for me. That’s one of the best feelings to have as a reader, and an incredible accomplishment for a writer.

It helps that the world in which Mosher absorbs us is precisely the world of my childhood. The characters, drawn with both honesty and compassion, are as familiar of figures to me as are the peculiarities of the northern Vermont landscape.

It’s a thrill to recognize in a novel a place you recognize, and to find it there as real and humane and complicated as it is in life.

I suppose that feeling is familiar to people from New York City, Los Angeles, or any of the other American metros explored in countless novels.

But for those of us from corners of the world where stories are passed rough-shod between generations more often than with the intervention of an editor and a publisher, seeing our own stories endowed with the confidence of an ISBN code is an affirmation that these stories matter, and not only to those of us whom they are directly about.

There’s maybe no better evangelist for this insight than Mosher’s “A Stranger in the Kingdom.”

Yes, it’s a novel that deals with the realities of small town life with unusual seriousness and a richness of understanding that’s almost unheard of in the world of published books.

But it is by no means limited to being a story about northern Vermont. End of the day, it’s not about that at all.

It’s about humans, with all our flaws and failures and moments of courage.