Cold Mountain is a 1997 historical novel by Charles Frazier which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
It tells the story of W. P. Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War who walks for months to return to Ada Monroe, the love of his life; the story shares several similarities with Homer’s The Odyssey.[
The narrative alternates back and forth every chapter between the stories of Inman and Ada, a minister’s daughter recently relocated from Charleston to a farm in the rural mountain community called Cold Mountain from which Inman hails.
Though they only knew each other for a brief time before Inman departed for the war, it is largely the hope of seeing Ada again that drives Inman to desert the army and make the dangerous journey back to Cold Mountain. Details of their brief history together are told at intervals in flashback over the course of the novel.
Cold Mountain has received a mixed critical reception. "Kirkus Reviews" in The Atlantic praises Frazier’s use of language, writing: "Frazier has Cormac McCarthy’s gift for rendering the pitch and tang of regional speech, and for catching some of the true oddity of human nature." Kirkus goes on to say that Cold Mountain is "a promising but overlong, uneven debut." Again the critic praises and rebukes the novel, stating: "the tragic climax is convincing but somewhat rushed, given the many dilatory scenes that have preceded it."
The length of the novel and the slow pace of the storytelling are again brought into question when the critic claims "there’s no doubt that Frazier can write; the problem is that he stops so often to savor the sheer pleasure of the act of writing in this debut effort."[7] The online periodical Publisher’s Weekly produced a more positive review of the book’s writing: "Frazier vividly depicts the rough and varied terrain of Inman’s travels and the colorful characters he meets." Publisher’s Weekly goes on to say that "Frazier shows how lives of soldiers and of civilians alike deepen and are transformed as a direct consequence of the war’s tragedy