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'Cold Mountain' is a first novel by American literary academic Charles Frazier, set in his native Blue Ridge Mountain area of the southern Appalachians. Published by Grove Press, the quality of its prose quickly attracted popular and critical acclaim, won the 1997 US National Book Award for fiction, and topped The New York Times bestseller list for over a year and a half, selling more than a million copies.

Synopsis: A brave but disillusioned Confederate soldier (Inman), seriously wounded in the American Civil War, abandons fighting for a cause he can no longer believe in and embarks on a hazardous trek back home to Cold Mountain, North Carolina, and his beloved Ada Monroe. During Inman's four-year absence, the lonely and refined Ada finds herself stranded on a mountain farmstead. Her struggles to survive are supported by the help and friendship of a fiercely independent drifter, Ruby Thewes.

The character of Inman was based on Frazier's great-great uncle, W.P. Inman, a Confederate soldier who was wounded during the Civil War in Virginia. He walked bravely for some 300 miles from the battlefield back to his mountain home in North Carolina.