COLD MOUNTAIN
Charles Frazier has created a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished land, a place where savagery coexists with splendour and human beings contend with the inhuman solitude of the wilderness. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches,
Charles Frazier has created a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished land, a place where savagery coexists with splendour and human beings contend with the inhuman solitude of the wilderness. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. 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.
- Vintage Contemporaries
- Paperback
- November 2003
- 449 Pages
- 9781400077823
Buy the Book
$14.99
About Charles Frazier
Charles Frazier is an American historical novelist. He won the 1997 National Book Award for Fiction for Cold Mountain. Frazier was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1973. He earned an M.A. from Appalachian State University in the mid-1970s, and received his Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina in 1986. He currently raises horses on a farm near Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Catherine, who teaches accounting, and their daughter Annie.
Praise
“A Whitmanesque foray into America: into its hugeness, its freshness, its scope and its soul.”—James Polk, The New York Times Book Review
“An astonishing debut . . . a genuinely romantic saga that attains the status of literature.”—Malcolm Jones, Newsweek
“As close to a masterpiece as American writing is going to come these days.”—Fred Chappell, Raleigh News & Observer
“Charles Frazier’s feeling for the Southern landscape is reverential and beautifully composed. He has written an astonishing first novel.”—Alfred Kazin, The New York Review of Books
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