Cold Mountain

by Charles Frazier

Overview

“A rare and extraordinary book . . . heart-stopping . . . spellbinding.”— San Francisco Chronicle

“A page turner that attains the status of literature.”— Newsweek

“Finely drawn, full of dark beauty and presentiment.”— New Yorker

“An astonishing first novel.”— New York Review of Books

Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain made publishing history in 1997 when it stood at 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 reissued for its twentieth year, this extraordinary tale of a soldier’s perilous journey back to his beloved at the end of the Civil War is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished land. Adapted into an Oscar nominated movie starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law, and a 2015 opera co-commissioned between Santa Fe Opera, Opera Philadelphia and the Minnesota Opera, Cold Mountain portrays an era that continues to speak eloquently to our time.

“A haunting, beautifully written tale.”— USA Today

“Strikingly beautiful.”— Newsday

“A richly rewarding first novel . . . Wonderfully convincing, finely detailed.” — Christian Science Monitor

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802126757
Publisher:	Grove Atlantic
Publication date:	06/13/2017
Edition description:	Anniversary ed.
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	18,387
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Charles Frazier grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. He is the author of Cold Mountain , the National Book Award Winner for Fiction, Thirteen Moons and Nightwoods.

Hometown:

Raleigh, North Carolina

Date of Birth:

1950

Place of Birth:

Asheville, North Carolina

Education:

B.A., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; M.A., Ph.D., Appalachian State University

Read an Excerpt

the shadow of a crow

At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. Inman's eyes and the long wound at his neck drew them, and the sound of their wings and the touch of their feet were soon more potent than a yardful of roosters in rousing a man to wake. So he came to yet one more day in the hospital ward. He flapped the flies away with his hands and looked across the foot of his bed to an open triple-hung window. Ordinarily he could see to the red road and the oak tree and the low brick wall. And beyond them to a sweep of fields and flat piney woods that stretched to the western horizon. The view was a long one for the flatlands, the hospital having been built on the only swell within eyeshot. But it was too early yet for a vista. The window might as well have been painted grey.

Had it not been too dim, Inman would have read to pass the time until breakfast, for the book he was reading had the effect of settling his mind. But he had burned up the last of his own candles reading to bring sleep the night before, and lamp oil was too scarce to be striking the hospital's lights for mere diversion. So he rose and dressed and sat in a ladderback chair, putting the gloomy room of beds and their broken occupants behind him. He flapped again at the flies and looked out the window at the first smear of foggy dawn and waited for the world to begin shaping up outside.

The window was tall as a door, and he had imagined many times that it would open onto some other place and let him walk through and be there. During his first weeks in the hospital, he had been hardly able to move his head, and all that kept his mind occupied had been watching out the window and picturing the old green places he recollected from home. Childhood places. The damp creek bank where Indian pipes grew. The corner of a meadow favored by brown-and-black caterpillars in the fall. A hickory limb that overhung the lane, and from which he often watched his father driving cows down to the barn at dusk. They would pass underneath him, and then he would close his eyes and listen as the cupping sound of their hooves in the dirt grew fainter and fainter until it vanished into the calls of katydids and peepers. The window apparently wanted only to take his thoughts back. Which was fine with him, for he had seen the metal face of the age and had been so stunned by it that when he thought into the future, all he could vision was a world from which everything he counted important had been banished or had willingly fled.

By now he had stared at the window all through a late summer so hot and wet that the air both day and night felt like breathing through a dishrag, so damp it caused fresh sheets to sour under him and tiny black mushrooms to grow overnight from the limp pages of the book on his bedside table. Inman suspected that after such long examination, the grey window had finally said about all it had to say. That morning, though, it surprised him, for it brought to mind a lost memory of sitting in school, a similar tall window beside him framing a scene of pastures and low green ridges terracing up to the vast hump of Cold Mountain. It was September. The hayfield beyond the beaten dirt of the school playground stood pant-waist high, and the heads of grasses were turning yellow from need of cutting. The teacher was a round little man, hairless and pink of face. He owned but one rusty black suit of clothes and a pair of old overlarge dress boots that curled up at the toes and were so worn down that the heels were wedgelike. He stood at the front of the room rocking on the points. He talked at length through the morning about history, teaching the older students of grand wars fought in...

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher