Frazier, Charles

(US, 1950– )

An academic, Frazier had published some travel writing and short stories before his best-selling Civil War novel, Cold Mountain (1997), about a wounded confederate veteran who discharges himself from hospital and takes a long walk home to the remote hills of North Carolina and the Woman He Left Behind. The style is self-consciously poetic. Inman's picaresque (if somewhat cinematically macho) adventures are gripping, but what really makes the book worth reading is the odd-couple relationship between his southern-belle lover, Ada, and Ruby, the abused hillbilly girl she takes in. Ada is pampered and impractical, Ruby is a survivor. Together they struggle to keep the farm going in the war-devastated South until Inman's return.

Stephen Crane, Sebastian Faulks, Leo Tolstoy  MH