Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

In 1997, Charles Frazier's debut novel Cold Mountain made publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New York Times best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier's eagerly-anticipated second novel, Thirteen Moons. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learning to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey, hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.

Charles Frazier was born in 1950 in Caroline-du-Nord, where he has always lived with his family. He becomes a professor at Caroline-du-Nord University after completing his studies in literature and winning awards. Return to Cold Mountain is based on the story of his arrière-arrière-grand-oncle and took five years of research into regional traditions, music, popular stories, military records, and late-nineteenth-century sudist journals. It was published in ten countries and won the National Book Prize in 1997.