Cold Mountain

by Helen Treutler

One of the most acclaimed first novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished America -- a country where savagery coexists with splendor and human beings contend with the inhuman solitude of the wilderness.

Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the lighting 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, 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 American Odyssey -- hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.

"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

"Extraordinary... A Whitmanesque foray into America: into its hugeness, its freshness into America: into its hugeness, its freshness its scope and its soul". -- The New York Times Book Review

"A great read -- a stirring Civil War tale told with epic sweep". -- People

"Strikingly beautiful... In its vivid evocation of a time and place, its steady story-telling momentum and its unabashed affirmation of a fiction that takes moral choice seriously, Cold Mountain calls to mind SnowFalling on Cedars". -- Newsday

"Heartbreakingly beautiful...elegantly told...down to the last haunting detail". -- John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

"Astonishing...a genuinely romantic saga that attains the status of literature". -- Newsweek

Genres: War, Relationships, Military Fiction, Love, Literary Fiction, Homeopathy, History

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 21, 2006

Reviews

[Jo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I learnt a lot about how totally awful the American Civil War was. There was some lovely writing, but the story didn't grab me and I was disappointed in the ending.