Cold Mountain.

FRAZIER, Charles.

Item Number: 131461

New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

First edition of the author’s first novel and basis for the acclaimed 2003 film. Octavo, original half cloth, cartographic endpapers. Signed by Charles Frazier on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by John Gall. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

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 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 a rural mountain community near Cold Mountain, North Carolina 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. It became a major best-seller, selling roughly three million copies worldwide. It was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film of the same name in 2003, directed by Anthony Minghella starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Renée Zellweger with Eileen Atkins, Brendan Gleeson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Jack White, Giovanni Ribisi, Donald Sutherland, and Ray Winstone.