Charles Frazier

Harvard Book Store welcomes CHARLES FRAZIER, the National Book Award–winning author of Cold Mountain, for a discussion of his latest novel, Varina.

About Varina

In his powerful fourth novel, Charles Frazier returns to the time and place of Cold Mountain, vividly bringing to life the chaos and devastation of the Civil War.

With her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects a life of security as a Mississippi landowner. He instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history—culpable regardless of her intentions.

The Confederacy falling, her marriage in tatters, and the country divided, Varina and her children escape Richmond and travel south on their own, now fugitives with “bounties on their heads, an entire nation in pursuit.”

Intimate in its detailed observations of one woman’s tragic life and epic in its scope and power, Varina is a novel of an American war and its aftermath. Ultimately, the book is a portrait of a woman who comes to realize that complicity carries consequences.

Praise

“Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details—he has a scholar’s command of the physical realities of early America and a novelist’s gift for bringing them to life.” —Time

“Charles Frazier’s feeling for the Southern landscape is reverential and beautifully composed.” —New York Review of Books

“Reading a Frazier novel is like listening to a fine symphony. He’s a maestro whose pen is his baton, beckoning the best that each sentence has to offer.” —Denver Post

“Frazier’s interjection of historical detail is richly informative, and his descriptions of the natural world of the South are lyrical . . . A sharp, evocative novel.” —Publishers Weekly