North Carolina author Charles Frazier won the National Book Award for his debut, Cold Mountain, an international bestseller that was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film. The novel traces the journey of Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army, in a story based in part on Frazier's great-great-uncle, W. P. Inman. The New York Times Book Review calls Cold Mountain, "A Whitmanesque foray into America: into its hugeness, its freshness, its scope and its soul." With his new novel, Varina, due out in April 2018, Frazier returns to the Civil War setting in another powerful work of historical fiction. At the novel’s center is Varina Howell Davis, a fascinating, if little-known teenager who ended up on the wrong side of history when she wed the much-older widower, Jefferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy. Varina lands at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history—culpable regardless of her intentions and a fugitive with "bounties on their heads, an entire nation in pursuit." Frazier is the author of the bestselling novels Thirteen Moons and Nightwoods. The Christian Science Monitor calls Nightwoods, "wonderful . . . There’s a dreamy spell set in motion by Frazier’s devotion to his native Appalachians. To read this book is to disappear deep into a meticulously created landscape." The Los Angeles Times hails Thirteen Moons “a literary journey of magnitude” and a novel that "belongs to the ages."