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.
'A remarkable first novel, a romance of love, of friendship, of family, of land. Frazier has inhaled the spirit of the age and breathes it into the reader's being... Cold Mountain sent this hardened reviewer weeping to her bed' - Erica Wagner, The Times
'This wonderful novel presents the terrible, discordant reality of life in a war. Profoundly moving, it raises all the big questions' - Christina Patterson, Observer
'A poetic account of hardship, violence and longing...From a simple framework of alternating narratives, Frazier builds up a richly detailed portrayal of a vanished world' - Daily Telegraph
Author
About Charles Frazier
Charles Frazier grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. COLD MOUNTAIN, his highly acclaimed first novel, was an international bestseller, selling over one million copies and winning the National Book Award in 1997. It was the inspiration for the Oscar-winning film directed by Anthony Minghella and starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law, and Renee Zellweger.
A second novel, THIRTEEN MOONS, was published by Sceptre in 2007.
NIGHTWOODS, Charles' latest novel set in a lakeside town in 1960s North Carolina, will be published by Sceptre in October 2011.
