[1] It tells the story of W. P. Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War who walks for months to return to Ada Monroe, the love of his life; the story shares several similarities with Homer's Odyssey,[2] with the protagonist's circuitous and often derailed journey homeward as the central example.

[4] The novel opens in a Confederate military hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, where Inman is recovering from battle wounds during the American Civil War.

After the death of a fellow soldier who'd occupied the bed next to his own, Inman decides to slip out of the hospital and return home to Cold Mountain, North Carolina.

The deserter faces an attempted armed robbery at a rural town, even though he carries a stolen LeMat revolver for protection.

The Guardsmen dig a shoddy mass grave and Inman pulls himself out, helped in part by some passing wild pigs.

Later, he meets a woman named Sara, whom he helps by tracking and recovering her hog; it is her only source of food for the winter but had just been seized by Union soldiers.

He then returns with a friend named Pangle, a gentle-natured young man who appears to have an unspecified intellectual disability but displays great musical aptitude.

However, as the party begins the trek back to the farm, the women and men split up, and Inman and Stobrod run into Captain Teague.

Again the critic praises and rebukes the novel, stating: "the tragic climax is convincing but somewhat rushed, given the many dilatory scenes that have preceded it."

"[10] The online periodical Publishers Weekly produced a more positive review of the book's writing: "Frazier vividly depicts the rough and varied terrain of Inman's travels and the colorful characters he meets."

Publishers Weekly goes on to say that "Frazier shows how lives of soldiers and of civilians alike deepen and are transformed as a direct consequence of the war's tragedy.

In prose filled with grace notes and trenchant asides, he has reset much of the Odyssey in 19th-century America, near the end of the Civil War."