Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain is Charles Frazier's 1997 historical novel, set in the closing phase of the American Civil War. W. P. Inman is a wounded Confederate soldier recovering in a military hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, who decides after the death of the man in the next bed to slip away from the hospital and walk home to Cold Mountain in the Carolina mountains. He and Ada Monroe knew each other only briefly before he left to fight; Ada is a minister's daughter who moved with her father from Charleston to a farm called Black Cove in the rural community near Cold Mountain, and it is her he is walking back to.

Ada's father has died and left her the farm, but she was raised to be genteel and city-bred and has no idea how to work land, so the property slides into disrepair. Ruby, a young drifter, arrives at Black Cove and begins teaching her how to keep it. Nearly every chapter alternates between Inman's journey and Ada's farm, and the route Inman takes home is circuitous and repeatedly derailed, a structure the novel shares with the Odyssey.

Cold Mountain won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and it remains the book for which Frazier is best known.