I'd highly recommend "Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier. It's a story surrounding the lives of people before and during the Civil War in the US. Really a great tale eloquently written in the vernacular of the times. It's been made into a movie but I've read the book and from the depth of the book I know there's no way the movie can compare.
It's a double story of two main characters with others flowing in and out, usually gone from death or tragedy. The protagonist is a deserter from the army of the South trying to get back home while avoiding the Home Guard who were always on the chase, looking for deserters to drag back to the battle fields. To stay free or to regain his freedom once captured took all the skills of a special type of man, a frontiersman, and a born killer and hunter, both of people and game.
“With the snow piling up outside, the warm dry cabin hidden in its fold of the mountain felt like a safe haven indeed, though it had not been such for the people who had lived there. Soldiers had found them and made the cabin trailhead to a path of exile, loss, and death. But for a while that night, it was a place that held within its walls no pain nor even a vague memory collection of pain.”
―
Charles Frazier,
Cold Mountain ]
I'm following up Cold Mountain with his second book "Thirteen Moons," a story about a white man who lived among the Cherokee Indians leading up to during and after their removal to the western territories during The Trail of Tears.
