"In prose filled with grace notes and trenchant asides, [Frazier] has reset much of The Odyssey in nineteenth-century America, near the end of the Civil War.... A Whitmanesque foray into America: into its hugeness, its freshness, its scope and its soul."

--The New York Times Book Review

"A rare and extraordinary book...heart-stopping...spellbinding."

--San Francisco Chronicle

"Charles Frazier’s feeling for the Southern landscape is reverential and beautifully composed. He has written an astonishing first novel."

--ALFRED KAZIN, The New York Review of Books

Thirteen Moons is the story of one man’s remarkable life, spanning a century of relentless change. At the age of twelve, an orphan named Will Cooper is given a horse, a key, and a map and is sent on a journey through the wilderness to the edge of the Cherokee Nation, the uncharted white space on the map. Will is a bound boy, obliged to run a remote Indian trading post. As he fulfills his lonesome duty, Will finds a father in Bear, a Cherokee chief, and is adopted by him and his people, developing relationships that ultimately forge Will’s eharacter All the while, his love of Claire, the enigmatic and captivating charge of volatile and powerful Featherstone, will forever rule will’s heart.

In a distinct write filled with both humor and yearning, Will tells of a lifelong search for home, the hunger for fortune and adventure, the rebuilding of a trampled culture, and above all an enduring pursuit of passion. As lie comes to realize, ’"When all else is lost and gone forcveb there is yearning. One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only desire trumps time."

Will Cooper, in the hands of Charles Frazier, becomes a classic American soul: a man devoted to a place and its people, a woman, and a way of life, all of which seem forever just beyond his reach. Thirteen Moons takes us from the uncharted wilderness of an unspoiled continent, across the South, up and down the Mississippi, and to the urban clamor of a raw Washington City. Throughout, will is swept along as the wild beauty of the nincteeuth century gives way to the telephones, automobiles, and encroaching railways of the twentieth. Steeped in history, rich in insight, and filled with moments of sudden beauty, Thirteen Moons is an unforgettable work of fiction by an American master.