[In the following excerpt, Patterson asserts that Cold Mountain "presents the terrible, discordant reality of life in a war."]

God, sex, pigs, mountains and cheese feature heavily in [Cold Mountain], offering enough sexual titillation and metaphysical speculation for the most guilt-ridden survivor of a Catholic childhood. The God of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, set in the American Civil War, is the squeaky-clean Protestant model of the pioneers. However, as the story unfolds, with its bewildering array of lives wrecked by the random ravages of war, perceptions of God, like everything else in the American Dream, become more complicated. Wounded on the Confederate side in the battle of Petersburg, Inman decides to desert and return to his sweetheart, Ada, at Cold Mountain. She has been alone on the family farm since the death of her wealthy father, suffering genteel hunger and nibbling only the odd tomato. Luckily, help arrives in the form of feisty Ruby, who knows everything there is to know about survival. Soon the two women are sowing, hoeing and ploughing with the gusto of characters from The Little House on the Prairie and then sinking down exhausted at sunset to eat hearty meals with 'gobs of biscuit dough the size of cat heads'.

While Ada is experiencing the novelty of labour, independence and a life in touch with the rhythms of nature, Inman is nursing his neck wound, scratching around for food and enduring one life-threatening encounter after another on his tortuous journey home. Not surprisingly, his American optimism and belief in progress has been replaced by the idea that 'at the rate we're going we'll be eating each other raw'. Only his hope of being reunited with Ada allows him to dream that 'his despair might be honed off to a point so fine and thin that it would be nearly the same as vanishing'.

As this quotation makes clear, the narrative voice is ponderous and archaic, full of words and phrases like 'somewhat', 'smote' and 'neither mark nor impress'. This initially feels like rather hard work, making it a difficult book to gallop through. Instead, the reader is forced to take it all at a slightly slower pace, to savour each episode of this magnificent adventure story and to allow the magic of the prose to work in its own way. It does. Full of graphic, unflinching details, striking concrete images and lyrically precise descriptions of the natural world, this wonderful novel presents the terrible, discordant reality of life in a war. Profoundly moving, it raises all the big questions, but offers no answers other than the recognition that 'what you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost…. All you can choose to do is go on or not'. Cold Mountain has, apparently, just been picked up as the next Anthony Minghella big-screen weepie. It certainly has all the right ingredients.