This arrived on our shores in 1998 as a large, expensive paperback and proceeded to sell through word-of-mouth. Then the publishers made a bold decision … they brought out a hardback turning the traditional publishing route of hardback, paperback upside down. I applauded, I am a firm believer that a new author (and this was a debut novel) should earn a hardback edition, and so Charles Frazier did. There then followed a mass market paperback and later a disappointing film. This is a big novel in every sense; long, detailed, dramatic and quite wonderful.
In 1997, Charles Fraziers 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 Fraziers 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 fathers 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.
