Stock photo. Cover may not represent actual copy or condition available.

Cold Mountain

by Charles Frazier

Summary

Based on stories in the author's family, this novel is about a wounded Civil War soldier who walks away from the hospital and finds his arduous way home to his sweetheart-a cultured young woman who has been forced to learn the brutal ways of farm life. The stories of the two lovers are intertwined; when they converge, they find that their worlds have changed radically, and so have they. Winner of the 1997 National Book Award for fiction.

Customer Reviews

Review this book!

Media Reviews

"...Charles Frazier has taken on a daunting task-and has done extraordinarily well by it. In prose filled with grace notes and trenchant asides, he has reset much of the "Odyssey" in 19th-century America, near the end of the Civil War....[A] memorable book."    -- James Polk

   -- New York Times Book Review

"As the lovers' reunion approaches, both are aware of their internal (and external) transformations, irrevocable changes that reflect those of the country in which they live. Their stories...are very different. Inman's is emphatically picaresque, a progression of grotesque and fantastic encounters reminiscent of Fielding or Richardson...Ada's chapters...form a more contemporary tale, the exploration of a woman's psychological development....Readers impatient with the relentless linearity of Inman's progress will find respite in Ada's concentric growth, and vice versa....[A]n exciting work of fiction....'Cold Mountain' delights, above all, as an exceedingly free natural history, in which Frazier's characters learn and live by their surroundings."    -- Claire Messud

   -- Washington Post Book World

"Charles Frazier's first novel is a rare and extraordinary book....[A] thoroughly mature work, literate and mythic in its scope....If you're ready to brave one after another heart-stopping passage and are prepared to take the punch-in-the-gut climax, don't miss the spellbinding 'Cold Mountain.' It's a brilliant and important first novel by a poetic topographer of the human soul."    -- Joe Cadora

   -- San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Charles Frazier's novel is at once spare and eloquent....The many moments of compassion seem entirely convincing and are very affecting....The understatement is...almost shattering. And then comes the ending."    -- Ann Beattie

"Charles Frazier's...feeling for the Southern landscape is reverential and beautifully composed. He has written an astonishing first novel, if that is what it is....The prose is so silky and arch in capturing the stiff speech of the period that the book must have had much unpublished work behind it....There is a lot of sorrow here. Frazier, for all his love of country, his country, knows this is not enough and cunningly draws on the kind of rough old Southern humor that Mark Twain knew by heart..."    -- Alfred Kazin

   -- New York Review of Books

"Frazier may be indebted to [Cormac] McCarthy, but 'Cold Mountain' evokes other writers as well-among them Stendahl, Tolstoy and Stephen Crane. If living in a tragic land is equal to living in a tragic time, as Wallace Stevens proposed, then Frazier's novel, like the best Civil War literature, explores what it means to exist in both. Despite its stylistic echoes, 'Cold Mountain' is an intensely moving novel, a spare but eloquent exegesis on love and war. The story of Inman and Ada will remain with you long after the oil lamp is extinguished."    -- Jonathan Miles

   -- Salon

"This novel is magnificent-in every conceivable aspect....'Cold Mountain' is one of the great accomplishments in American literature."    -- Rick Bass

For his first novel, former writing instructor Frazier draws on his family history. A wounded Confederate soldier walks home through the ravaged South to a sweetheart who has been as changed by the war as he.

   -- Library Journal

Rich in evocative physical detail and timeless human insight, this debut novel set in the Civil War era rural South considers themes both grand (humanity's place in nature) and intimate (a love affair transformed by the war) as a wounded soldier makes his way home to the highlands of North Carolina and to his prewar sweetheart. Shot in the neck during fighting at Petersburg, Inman was not expected to survive. After regaining the strength to walk, he begins his dangerous odyssey. Just as the traumas of life on the battlefront have changed Inman, the war's new social and economic conditions have left their mark on Ada. With the death of her father and loss of income from his investments, Ada can no longer remain a pampered Charleston lady but must eke out a living from her father's farm in the Cold Mountain community, where she is an outsider. Frazier vividly depicts the rough and varied terrain of Inman's travels and the colorful characters he meets, all the while avoiding Federal raiders and the equally brutal Home Guard. The sweeping cycle of Inman's homeward journey is deftly balanced by Ada's growing sense of herself and her connection to the natural world around the farm. In a leisurely, literate narrative, Frazier shows how lives of soldiers and of civilians alike deepen and are transformed as a direct consequence of the war's tragedy. There is quiet drama in the tensions that unfold as Inman and Ada come ever closer to reunion, yet farther from their former selves.

   -- Publishers Weekly

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Pr
Published date: 1997
Size: 6.5 x 9.75 inches
Weight: 1.4 pounds
Pages: 356

Publisher's Notes

Based on local history and family stories passed down by the author's great-great-grandfather, Cold Mountain is the tale of a wounded soldier Inman, who walks away from the ravages of the war and back home to his prewar sweetheart, Ada. Inman's odyssey through the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South interweaves with Ada's struggle to revive her father's farm, with the help of an intrepid young drifter named Ruby. As their long-separated lives begin to converge at the close of the war, Inman and Ada confront the vastly transformed world they've been delivered. Charles Frazier reveals marked insight into man's relationship to the land and the dangers of solitude. He also shares with the great nineteenth-century novelists a keen observation of a society undergoing change. Cold Mountain re-creates a world gone by that speaks eloquently to our time.

Other Editions

• Hardcover - Pub Group West (1997) - from $1.00
• Paperback Reissue - Random House Inc (1998) - from $1.00

Similar books

Ready to buy this book?