Cold Mountain

A wounded Confederate soldier stands at a hospital window in Raleigh in the last autumn of the war, and decides. Inman has been shot through the neck at Petersburg, has seen Fredericksburg and everything after, and owes the Confederacy nothing he has not overpaid; he walks out the window and turns west, toward Cold Mountain, the Blue Ridge country of his boyhood, and toward Ada, the woman he knew only briefly before the war and has thought of ever since.

The novel alternates the two of them chapter by chapter. Inman's walk is an Odyssey conducted at night and off roads, since the Home Guard hangs deserters, and Frazier stocks it with the war's inland wreckage: preachers with secrets, ferrymen, root doctors, widows, bounty men, each encounter a story in itself. Ada, meanwhile, a Charleston minister's over educated daughter stranded by his death on a farm she cannot work, is saved by the arrival of Ruby, a fierce, unlettered local woman who knows everything Ada does not, and their transformation of Black Cove, seasons, crops, fences, a friendship of perfect equality, is the book's second, quieter epic.

The reunion, when the two threads finally cross in the winter woods, is brief, complete and shadowed by the Home Guard, and the ending spares nothing while still, in its epilogue, leaving the farm alive.

Around four hundred and eighty pages in the current paperback, written in a measured, herb and weather rich prose built from period documents.

Best for readers who want the Civil War from underneath, a love story where the lovers spend almost the whole book apart and it works.