This unabridged audio version of Cold Mountain, read by author Charles Frazier, deserves at least as much acclaim as the bestselling print edition, which won the National Book Award. The tale chronicles a Confederate army deserter's search for home and love in the last days of the Civil War.

Much has been made of the story's homage to The Odyssey, the origins of which are found in an oral tradition. One can't help but hear echoes of Homer when listening to Frazier's soft, deliberate voice give life to his lyrical writing and to his understated, yet convincing rendering of the overwhelming events of war. Both Frazier's prose and reading are leisurely, recalling a slow foot pace. His delivery is uniquely suited to Innman's arduous, adventure-filled walk toward home and to the possibility of a reunion with Ada, the woman he loves. The author's reading does equal justice to Ada, who is being transformed by her struggle for survival on her father's farm. There is precious little dialogue, and Frazier makes no effort at acting out the characters.

One small irritation in the production is a beeping noise at the end of each side. Another minor complaint is that the tapes don't have individual boxes, which was perhaps an attempt to make the overall package appear more booklike. The recording does, however, make deft use of two brief musical interludes. In a subtle twist, the fiddle music that opens the first cassette, when repeated as an accompaniment to the epilogue, carries a bittersweet and unexpected resonance. By all means, forgive Random House Audio the tiny glitches, pass over that slender abridged version, and take home the real thing. This audiocassette is a journey that will leave few listeners unchanged by the experience. (Running time: 14.5 hours, 12 cassettes) --Naomi J. Cohn

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From School Library Journal
A Civil War soldier and a lonely woman embark on parallel journeys of danger and discovery. Environment, events, and the empathy of others transform the protagonists spiritually as well as physically. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
An audiobook read by an author is not the same as one read by an actor. Compared to a professional reader, Frazier is a dud. He does no character voices, not even distinguishing by gender; no accents; and few if any distinguishable changes in pace, intensity, etc. In fact at times he stumbles, though the editing process has obviously eliminated any major problems. About the only personality he adds to this recording is a few old-fashioned pronunciations, which may be deliberate, or may be personal idiosyncrasies. Still, the reading works. Frazier has a soft, pleasant and sensitive voice that communicates emotion apparently without effort. Clearly, there is an intangible working here. Knowledge by the author of every nuance of the work (seven years in the making) and knowledge by the listener that this is coming from the horse's mouth makes the reading, though lacking in intensity, nevertheless engrossing and finally emotionally powerful. Highly recommended.?Preston Hoffman, Shelby, NCCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Entertainment Weekly
A loose refashioning of the classic Odyssean myth, Mountain trails, in exquisitely researched detail, the treacherous 300-mile journey of a wounded Confederate deserter named Inman--back to the brilliant, cultured outsider Ada whom he doesn't quite dare believe will become his wife. There is enough weapon clanging to satisfy all but the most bloodthirsty Civil War buffs, yet Frazier lavishes equal narrative weight on Ada's trials and ravaged psyche as she watches and waits, struggling to tend her dead father's farm.

The New York Times Book Review, James Polk
For a first novelist, in fact for any novelist, Charles Frazier has taken on a daunting task--and has done extraordinarily well by it. In prose filled with grace notes and trenchant asides, he has reset much of the Odyssey in 19th-century America near the end of the Civil War.

Newsweek
Novelists are never in short supply. Natural-born storytellers come along only rarely. Charles Frazier joins the ranks of that elite cadre on the first page of his astonishing debut.

Raleigh News and Observer
This is one of the best books I have ever opened....Cold Mountain is as close to a masterpiece as American writing is going to come these days.

Rick Bass
This novel is so magnificent -- in every conceivable aspect, and others previously unimagined -- that it has occurred to me that the shadow of this book, and the joy I received in reading it, will fall over every other book I ever read....Cold Mountain is one of the great accomplishments in American literature.

Ann Beattie
Charles Frazier's novel is at once spare and eloquent, a panorama that the author stills long enough to make a portrait -- a very evocative portrait of Inman, a soldier who is trying to escape a ruined world. Interspersed with so many moments of sadness, the many moments of compassion seem entirely convincing and are very affecting; when Ada `wanted to tell him how she had come to be what she was,' the understatement -- as it is so often in Cold Mountain -- is almost shattering. And then comes the ending.

From AudioFile
Charles Frazier delivers a soulful reading of his novel, which won the 1997 National Book Award. He tells the tale of Inman, a wounded Confederate soldier who leaves his hospital bed to make his way home. An internalized odyssey weaves lives of Inman and Ada, his prewar sweetheart, who struggles alone with the farm on Cold Mountain. Frazier offers few characterizations in voice, but his elegant language takes center stage. His slow pace suits the story and allows listeners to savor each image but occasionally lacks energy that might liven the images he describes. Frazier is steady and relentless, echoing the sense of purpose and destiny of this characters. His writing reveals the fluidity of a storyteller, and the audiobook becomes a natural extension of his skill. R.F.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
The Civil War's last months are the setting for this first novel by Frazier, erstwhile college teacher and author of travel books and stories. Inman, a wounded Confederate soldier, leaves the hospital before his gashed neck heals enough to get him sent back to war. Still weak, he heads for the mountains, where a minister's daughter named Ada is his objective. Inman's return could hardly be timelier for the Charleston-raised Ada: her father has died, and she finds she knows little about operating a farm. Frazier blends the story of Inman's journey with that of Ada's efforts, with the help of a drifter named Ruby, to wring a subsistence living from the neglected land; in the background are the yelping dogs of war (most dramatically, gangs chasing Confederate deserters like Inman), as well as hints of changes the end of war will bring. Cold Mountain, based on a Frazier family story, is a satisfying read, though for some readers elements of the story (e.g., Ada's dependence) are anachronistic. Mary Carroll

From Kirkus Reviews
A grim story about a tough, resourceful Southern family in the Civil War is somewhat submerged by the weight of lyrical detail piled on the tale, and by the slow pace of the telling. 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. Inman, seeing that the end of the war is near, decides to leave his regiment and go back home to Ada, the bright, stubborn woman he loves. His adventures traversing a chaotic, impoverished land, Ada's struggles to preserve her father's farm, and the harsh, often powerful tales of the rough-hewn individuals they encounter take up most of the narrative. The tragic climax is convincing but somewhat rushed, given the many dilatory scenes that have preceded it. 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, but he doesn't yet possess McCarthy's ferocious focus. A promising but overlong, uneven debut. (First printing of 40,000; author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Willie Morris
Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is the most impressive and enthralling first novel I have read in a long time. It is a magnetic story, ambitious in scope, with richly developed characters and beautiful evocations of landscape. Though set in an earlier time, it is contemporary in the profoundest sense, with resonance of A Farewell to Arms.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain has quickly established itself as a must-read. Everyone is talking about this eloquent and ambitious first novel; word-of-mouth recommendations and dust jacket blurbs, even serious literary reviews are trembling beneath the weight of the half-forgotten superlatives that have been dusted off and pressed into service for this book. I must admit to redlining the adjectivometer a bit myself while singing its praises. Frazier's astonishing fiction debut is a literary page-turner -- an utterly compelling story driven by rhythmic, resonant prose and convincing historical detail.

Cold Mountain is the story of Inman, a wounded and soul-sick Confederate soldier who, like his literary fellow-traveler Odysseus, has quit the field of battle only to find the way home littered with impediments and prowled by adversaries. Inman's Penelope is Ada, a headstrong belle who has forsaken her place in Charleston society in order to accompany her father -- a tubercular southern gentleman turned missionary -- to a new home in the healthy mountain air of North Carolina. Frazier divides the narrative between Inman's homeward progress and Ada's struggle to make it on her own after her father dies, establishing an underlying tension that is at once subtle and irresistible.

Inman is critically wounded in the fighting outside Petersburg and, after a rough triage, he is "classed among the dying and put on a cot to do so." When his body stubbornly refuses to comply, he is evacuated further south to a hospital where he may succumb at his leisure. But against all odds, Inman's terrible injury insists upon healing itself. During the long months of convalescence he struggles to shed the hated, insulating numbness put on against the carnage he has seen -- Malvern Hill, Sharpsburg, Petersburg, Fredericksburg -- and probes his psychic wounds for the shrapnel of his former self. He finds instead a refuge in the "topography of home in his head" and the Cherokee folk tales of his childhood friend Swimmer:

"As Inman sat brooding and pining for his lost self, one of Swimmer's creekside stories rushed into his memory with great urgency and attractiveness. Swimmer claimed that above the blue vault of heaven there was a forest inhabited by a celestial race. Men could not go there to stay and live, but in that high land the dead spirit could be reborn.

"Though Inman could not recall whether Swimmer had told him what else might be involved in reaching that healing realm, Cold Mountain nevertheless soared in his mind as a place where all his scattered forces might gather. Inman did not consider himself to be a superstitious person, but he did believe that there is a world invisible to us. He no longer thought of that world as heaven, nor did he still think that we get to go there when we die. Those teachings had been burned away. But he could not abide by a universe composed only of what he could see, especially when it was so frequently foul. So he held to the idea of another world, a better place, and he figured he might as well consider Cold Mountain to be the location of it as anywhere."

Knowing that he will soon be deemed fit to return to active duty, Inman decides it is time to see if his "better place" still exists. He gathers what provisions he has been able to hoard, readies his fearsome LeMats revolver -- a double-barreled affair capable of firing nine .40 caliber rounds as well as a single load of shot -- slips out of the hospital under the cover of darkness, and begins the long walk home.

Meanwhile, Ada is reeling from her own mortal blow. The death of her father has left her penniless and alone, without the slightest idea of how she will survive. Though "educated beyond the point considered wise for females," she now finds that her vaunted talents -- a deft hand at the piano and a literary turn of mind -- have little value in the wartime barter economy of the rural South. The well-meaning members of her father's former congregation fully expect Ada to sell out and return to Charleston, but the prospect of begging charity or entering into some "mildly disguised parasitic relationship" with distant kin disgusts her. Salvation arrives in the form of Ruby Thewes, a solitary young mountain woman who teaches Ada the basic tenets of self-reliance and a Tolstoyan reverence for physical labor. "Simply living had never struck Ada as such a tiresome business" -- but her exertions give her a pride in her land and an ease with herself that she has never known.

Inman's lowland odyssey is fraught with peril. He travels mostly at night to avoid the Home Guard -- brutal vigilante bands who patrol the highways for runaway slaves and deserting "outliers" -- but encounters a strange assortment of misfits nonetheless: Veasey, the defrocked preacher and would-be "pistoleer" who appoints Inman his personal confessor; Odell, once heir to a Georgia planter, doomed to wander the southland in search of his slave lover; Junior, a noisome and treacherous hillbilly; and a wise old goatwoman who gives him a glimpse of God's mercy.

Time and again Frazier addresses the mysteries of faith and redemption. Though the war has ravaged the countryside and broken its people in body and in spirit, salvation -- admittedly, salvation of a humanist sort -- is always possible for those who dare to ask it. Even Ruby's long-lost father, Stobrod, a wastrel who has spent the majority of his life occupied in either the manufacture or the consumption of moonshine, is born again through his music. As in Goethe's dictum, "der weg ist das ziel," the seeking is in itself the path to finding redemption. Those who make the journey -- physically or spiritually -- ultimately find comfort; those who do not live a hell on earth.

A book as assured and as satisfying as Cold Mountain is a cause for celebration, and a first novel of this caliber (David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars comes to mind) is exceptional indeed. Charles Frazier has made an auspicious debut.

—Greg Marrs

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Based on local history and family stories passed down by the author's great-great-grandfather, Cold Mountain is the tale of a wounded soldier Inman, who walks away from the ravages of the war and back home to his prewar sweetheart, Ada. Inman's odyssey through the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South interweaves with Ada's struggle to revive her father's farm, with the help of an intrepid young drifter named Ruby. As their long-separated lives begin to converge at the close of the war, Inman and Ada confront the vastly transformed world they've been delivered.

Charles Frazier reveals marked insight into man's relationship to the land and the dangers of solitude. He also shares with the great nineteenth-century novelists a keen observation of a society undergoing change. Cold Mountain recreates a world gone by that speaks eloquently to our time.

FROM THE CRITICS

San Francisco Chronicle

Charles Frazier's first novel is a rare and extraordinary book, a Civil War novel concerned less with battlefields than with the landscape of the human soul.

Raleigh News & Observer

A masterpiece.

Publishers Weekly

Rich in evocative physical detail and timeless human insight, this debut novel set in the Civil War era rural South considers themes both grand (humanity's place in nature) and intimate (a love affair transformed by the war) as a wounded soldier makes his way home to the highlands of North Carolina and to his pre-war sweetheart. Shot in the neck during fighting at Petersburg, Inman was not expected to survive. After regaining the strength to walk, he begins his dangerous odyssey. Just as the traumas of life on the battlefront have changed Inman, the war's new social and economic conditions have left their mark on Ada. With the death of her father and loss of income from his investments, Ada can no longer remain a pampered Charleston lady, but must eke out a living from her father's farm in the Cold Mountain community, where she is an outsider.

Frazier vividly depicts the rough and varied terrain of Inman's travels and the colorful characters he meets, all the while avoiding Federal raiders and the equally brutal Home Guard. The sweeping cycle of Inman's homeward journey is deftly balanced by Ada's growing sense of herself and her connection to the natural world around the farm. In a leisurely, literate narrative, Frazier shows how lives of soldiers and of civilians alike deepen and are transformed as a direct consequence of the war's tragedy. There is quiet drama in the tensions that unfold as Inman and Ada come ever closer to reunion, yet farther from their former selves.

Library Journal

This monumental novel is set at the end of the Civil War and follows the journey of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman as he returns home. Interwoven is the story of Ada, the woman he loves. Ada, who was raised in genteel society, cannot cope with the rigors of war until a woman called Ruby arrives to help her. Inman comes across memorable characters like the goatwoman, who lives off the secret herbs in the woods and Sara, a woman stranded with an infant who is assaulted by Yankee soldiers whom Inman later kills. After a long, threatening journey, Inman finally arrives home to Ada, 'ravaged, worn ragged and wary and thin.' A remarkable effort that opens up a historical past that will enrich readers not only with its story but with its strong characters. -- David A. Beron, University of New England, Biddeford, Maine

Library Journal

This monumental novel is set at the end of the Civil War and follows the journey of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman as he returns home. Interwoven is the story of Ada, the woman he loves. Ada, who was raised in genteel society, cannot cope with the rigors of war until a woman called Ruby arrives to help her. Inman comes across memorable characters like the goatwoman, who lives off the secret herbs in the woods and Sara, a woman stranded with an infant who is assaulted by Yankee soldiers whom Inman later kills. After a long, threatening journey, Inman finally arrives home to Ada, 'ravaged, worn ragged and wary and thin.' A remarkable effort that opens up a historical past that will enrich readers not only with its story but with its strong characters. -- David A. Beron, University of New England, Biddeford, MaineRead all 11 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Cold Mountain is the best Civil War novel since Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. Written in a style equal to that of Shelby Foote, this novel deserves any and all prizes that might be lying about.
 — Kaye Gibbons

Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is the most impressive and enthralling first novel I have read in a long time. It is a magnetic story, ambitious in scope, with richly developed characters and beautiful evocations of landscape. Though set in an earlier time, it is contemporary in the profoundest sense, with resonance of A Farewell to Arms.
 — Willie Morris

Cold Mountain is a heartbreakingly beautiful story, elegantly told and utterly convincing down the last haunting detail.
 — John Berendt

This novel is so magnificent—in every conceivable aspect, and others previously unimagined—that it has occurred to me that the shadow of this book, and the joy I received in reading it, will fall over every other book I ever read. It seems even possible to never want to read another book, so wonderful is this one. Cold Mountain is one of the great accomplishments in American literature.
 — Rick Bass

Charles Frazier's novel is at once spare and eloquent, a panorama that the author stills long enough to make a portrait—a very evocative portrait of Inman, a soldier who is trying to escape a ruined world. Interspersed with so many moments of sadness, the many moments of compassion see entirely convincing and are very affecting; when Ada 'wanted to tell him how she had come to be what she was,' the understatement—as it is so often in Cold Mountain—is almost shattering. And then comes the ending.
 — Ann Beattie

Cold Mountain is the best Civil War novel since Michaels Shaara's The Killer Angels. Written in a style equal to that of Shelby Foote, this novel deserves any and all prizes that might be lying about. — Kaye Gibbons