Cold Mountain

Wounded and sickened by slaughter, Confederate soldier Inman slips away from a Virginia hospital and starts walking hundreds of miles home to Cold Mountain in North Carolina. He carries little but the memory of Ada, the Charleston woman he loved before the war, and letters that must stand in for promises. Alone on the farm her dead father left her, Ada does not know how to feed herself through cold and scarcity until stranger Ruby, who reads soil and weather like print, teaches her to labor and endure. As Inman threads forests, flooded rivers and patrols hunting deserters, both are stripped to what they can carry and do, pulled toward a reunion neither knows the other wants or will live to keep.