Nearly a decade after Charles Frazier's debut novel "Cold Mountain" was released to wide acclaim, vaulting him from lecturer to literary heavyweight, he has made his highly awaited return to the New York Times best-seller list with his book "Thirteen Moons."

The most anticipated follow-up act in at least a decade, Frazier tells the story of the destruction of the Cherokee nation in the frontier wilderness in the North Carolina mountains.

Like its predecessor, "Thirteen Moons" is a meticulously researched historical novel, this time inspired by the real-life story of a 19-century orphan who was adopted by the Cherokees.

"It's a part of the history of the place I grew up, the place I still live and I was interested in how most of the Cherokee were sent out on the 'Trail of Tears'," said the soft-speaking author, appearing on CTV's Canada AM.

The Trail of Tears refers to former U.S. president Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy in the 1830s that forced the Cherokee nation to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and relocate in the Western United States.

"My neighbours when I grew up were Cherokee who were able to stay and I wanted to write a book about how this little group managed to resist this overwhelming force, trying to take them away from their homes and send them away," said Frazier, the son of a high-school principal and a school librarian, who grew up in the mountains of North Carolina.

The book tells the story of Will Cooper, an orphaned white man who runs a trading post in the wilderness of the Cherokee nation. It is the tale of his remarkable fight to preserve the Cherokee's homeland and culture in nineteenth-century America against the background of a vanishing people and a rich way of life.

"He's sent out into the wilderness when he's 12, and he makes his way through the world. He's a character who moves forward. he's always going somewhere, even if he's not entirely sure where, he's in motion," said Frazier, who now splits his time between North Carolina and Florida.

"His primary allegiance is to this group of Indians who took him in when he was a boy and had nowhere else to go in the world, so he's bound to them for the rest of his life."

Frazier was inspired to write about the book while researching "Cold Mountain," he said.

He told CTV.ca he came across a reference to a 90-year-old man in an asylum in Raleigh, N.C., in the late 1800s-a white man named William Holland Thomas.

The reference piqued his interest and the idea was borne.

Rather than set out to write a book with a message he wants to convey, Frazier's main intention is to create a "vivid and believable place," he says.

"Whether it's Washington in the early 1830s or the southern Appalachians, I love trying to do that," he said.

To accomplish this task, Frazier pored over documents from rare books rooms, letters, and government reports.

This book involved a lot of primary sources, a lot of military reports, letters, a bunch of travel writing from that period. I like travel as a genre and read a lot of travel writing, like people writing about travelling on riverboats, people writing about going to Washington on business at that period of time," he said.

Sometimes, his research simply involved taking time to walk in the words and "thinking about how a scene could unfold if it were happening in the spot where I am standing."

The story behind 'Cold Mountain'

The yarn behind Frazier's debut novel is one of the most-retold stories in modern publishing history.

He quit his job as a lecturer at North Carolina State in the early 1990s with his wife Katherine's blessing to work full-time on his novel.

"First of all it wasn't a very good job, it was what so many people that got PhDs in literature ended up with then. ... My wife had a real academic job, a tenured job and our daughter was young so I was the main carpool parent. I was trying to do all that and write a book and the book was coming third and really not making much progress on it," Frazier told CTV.ca.

"We ended up just deciding that if the book was ever going to get finished, I was going to have to do two of those jobs instead of three."

The most he left himself hope is that someone somewhere would publish his book and he would secure a better teaching job.

Eventually he showed his writing to fiction writer Kaye Gibbons, who he met because their daughters went to the same school.

She sent it to New York and Atlantic Monthly Press published it.

Following its 1997 release, the hardback and paperback versions spent a combined 94 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

By 1997 "Cold Mountain" had became a word-of-mouth sensation, winning over critics and readers alike.

That same year, Frazier won the National Book Award for the title.

The huge popular success paved the way for a film adaptation that made its way on to the silver screen in 2003 as a big-budget Hollywood movie in the hands eminent filmmaker Anthony Minghella and featuring a star-studded cast.

Frazier admits that when he began writing "Cold Mountain," he was optimistic but wary.

"A first novel usually sells 8,000 copies so I would have to have been deluded to expect that kind of success," he said, appearing on CTV's Canada AM.

And yet, his book surpassed all expectations, selling more than 4 million copies.

The wild success led Random House to give Frazier an $8 million advance for "Thirteen Moons."

Much to his chagrin, the advance made headlines.

"I had called my mother after that deal had been made and she mentioned seeing it on the crawl across the bottom of the screen on CNN."

So the story went, the publisher was paying more than US $8 million for the right to publish his second novel, while producer Scott Rudin was paying $3 million for the movie rights.

Four years later, Frazier is still wondering how that figure got out.

"I still don't know how that happened, I don't know where that leak originated, I would love to know."

But the advance, which is believed to be the heftiest ever paid for a single novel, has arguably put pressure on the novel to soar off the shelves.

Juggling expectations

Asked how it felt to write the book knowing he was being paid an unprecedented advance, Frazier said he did his best to put it out of his mind.

"The main thing was trying not to think about expectations other than mine for the book because it could just become paralyzing. If I ever began to think that I need to write something that a lot of people will want to read, then I would just be stuck, so the struggle was not to let that be in my mind when I went to my office to work every day."

When he received advance copies of his book, one of the first things he did was present them to the Cherokee community.

"Partly I wanted to explain what my intentions were and partly I wanted to find out if they didn't like the book," he said.

Not only was the book well-received, so was Frazier.

"The most gratifying thing about this book is the reaction I've gotten over there," he said, adding that he was in the community for his birthday at the beginning of the month, and he had "Happy Birthday" sung to him in Cherokee.

Not only is he telling the Cherokee story, he is also funding a translation project to render portions of the novel into Cherokee, part of an initiative to preserve the language.

Now that his book has been published, and Frazier's book tour is near completion, he is going to start mulling his next project.

He has a couple of ideas for short novels, while he won't divulge their subject matter, he revealed that both of them are "out of the 19th century."

Meanwhile the film adaptation for "Thirteen Moons" is in its early stages. Frazier says he received a phone call from a producer a few weeks ago advising him that they were just starting to make a list of directors and screenwriters.

So far the critical reception to the book has been mixed but Frazier tries not to worry about that.

"I rarely read reviews," Frazier says.

"My only impression on this book is just that really the farther away from New York and the Northeast you get the better reviews are, there have been some really amazing ones in the South and the West."

While he draws no conclusions about this division, Frazier believes Southerners from mountainous regions, like himself, continue to be perceived as illiterate hillbillies.

He recounts an anecdote about a faculty dinner at a professor's house after he and his wife had moved to Boulder to teach at the University of Colorado.

"This woman without even realizing that she was being kind of insulting, said 'My goodness, imagine, a boy from Appalachia getting a PhD!' he recounts.

"I was not very politic at that moment. I just said, 'My grandparents didn't have indoor plumbing but they had more books in their house than you do.'"

He doesn't remember getting a response. "I more remember a kind of silence around the table," he said with a laugh.

Indeed, years after that exchange, Frazier is still having the last laugh.

Excerpt from Charles Frazier's "Thirteen Moons"

There is no scatheless rapture. love and time put me in this condition. I am leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel. We're called to it. I feel it pulling at me, same as everyone else. It is the last unmapped country, and a dark way getting there. A sorrowful path. And maybe not exactly Paradise at the end. The belief I've acquired over a generous and nevertheless inadequate time on earth is that we arrive in the afterlife as broken as when we departed from the world. But, on the other hand, I've always enjoyed a journey.

Cloudy days, I sit by the fire and talk nothing but Cherokee. Or else I sit silent with pen and paper, rendering the language into Sequoyah's syllabary, the characters forming under my hand like hen- scratch hieroglyphs. On sunny days, I usually rock on the porch wrapped in a blanket and read and admire the vista. Many decades ago, when I built my farm out of raw land, I oriented the front of the house to aim west toward the highest range of mountains. It is a grand long view. The river and valley, and then the coves and blue ridges heaved up and ragged to the limits of eyesight.

Bear and I once owned all the landscape visible from my porch and a great deal more. People claimed that in Old Europe our holdings would have been enough land to make a minor country. Now I have just the one little cove opening onto the river. The hideous new railroad, of which I own quite a few shares, runs through my front yard. The black trains come smoking along twice a day, and in the summer when the house windows are open, the help wipes the soot off the horizontal faces of furniture at least three times a week. On the other side of the river is a road that has been there as some form of passway since the time of elk and buffalo, both long since extinguished. Now, mules drawing wagons flare sideways in the traces when automobiles pass. I saw a pretty one go by the other day. Yellow as a canary and trimmed with polished brass. It had a windshield like an oversized monocle, and it went ripping by at a speed that must have been close to a mile a minute. The end of the driver's red scarf flagged straight out behind him, three feet long. I hated the racket and the dust that hung in the air long after the automobile was gone. But if I was twenty, I'd probably be trying to find out where you buy one of those fast bastards.

the night has become electrified. Midevening, May comes to my room. The turn of doorknob, click of bolt in hasp. The opening door casts a wedge of yellow hall light against the wall. Her slender dark hand twists the switch and closes the door. Not a word spoken. The brutal light is message enough. A clear glass bulb hangs in the center of the room from a cord of brown woven cloth. New wires run down the wall in an ugly metal conduit. The bare bulb's little blazing filament burns an angry cloverleaf shape onto my eyeballs that will last until dawn. It's either get up and shut off the electricity and light a candle to read by, or else be blinded.

I get up and turn off the light.

May is foolish enough to trust me with matches. I set fire to two tapers and prop a polished tin pie plate to reflect yellow light. The same way I lit book pages and notebook pages at a thousand campfires in the last century.

I'm reading The Knight of the Cart, a story I've known since youth. Lancelot is waiting where I left him the last time. Still every bit as anguished and torn about whether to protect his precious honor or to climb onto the shameful cart with the malefic dwarf driver, and perhaps by doing so to save Guinevere, perhaps have Guinevere for his own true love. Choosing incorrectly means losing all. I turn the pages and read on, hoping Lancelot will choose better if given one more chance. I want him to claim love over everything, but so far he has failed. How many more chances will I be able to give him?

The gist of the story is that even when all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only desire trumps time.

A bedtime drink would be helpful. At some point in life, everybody needs medication to get by. A little something to ease the pain, smooth the path forward. But my doctor prohibits liquor, and so my own home has become as strict as if it were run by hard-shell Baptists. Memory is about the only intoxicant left.

I read on into the night until the house falls quiet. Lancelot is hopeless. I am dream-stricken to think he will ever choose better.

At some point, I put the book down and hold my right palm to the light. The silver scar running diagonal across all the deep lines seems to itch, but scratching does not help.

Late in the night, the door opens again. Scalding metallic light pours in from the hallway. May enters and walks to my bed. Her skin is the color of tanned deerhide, a mixture of several bloods-white and red and black-complex enough to confound those legislators who insist on naming every shade down to the thirty-second fraction. Whatever the precise formula is for May, it worked out beautifully. She's too pretty to be real.

I knew her grandfather back in slavery days. Knew him and also owned him, if I'm to tell the truth. I still wonder why he didn't cut my throat some night while I was asleep. I'd have had it coming. All us big men would have. But through some unaccountable generosity, May is as kind and protective as her grandfather was.

May takes the book as from a sleepy child, flaps it face down on the nightstand, blows out the candle with a moist breath, full lips pursed and shaped like a bow. I hear a hint of rattle in the lungs as the breath expires. I worry for her, though my doctor says she is fine. Consumption, though, is a long way to die. I've seen it happen more than once. May steps back to the door and is a black spirit shape against the light, like a messenger in a significant dream.

-Sleep, Colonel. You've read late.

Funny thing is, I actually try. I lie flat on my back in the dark with my arms on my chest. But I can't sleep. It is a bitter-cold night and the fire has burnt down to hissing coals. I don't ever sleep well anymore. I lie in bed in the dark and let the past sweep over me like stinging sheets of windblown rain. My future is behind me. I let gravity take me into the bed and before long I'm barely breathing. Practicing for the Nightland.

survive long enough and you get to a far point in life where nothing else of particular interest is going to happen. After that, if you don't watch out, you can spend all your time tallying your losses and gains in endless narrative. All you love has fled or been taken away. Everything fallen from you except the possibility of jolting and unforewarned memory springing out of the dark, rushing over you with the velocity of heartbreak. May walking down the hall humming an old song-"The Girl I Left Behind Me"-or the mere fragrance of clove in spiced tea can set you weeping and howling when all you've been for weeks on end is numb.

At least that last one is explainable. Back in green youth, Claire became an advocate for flavored kisses. She would break off new spring growth at the end of a birch twig, peel the dark bark to the wet green pulp, and fray the fibers with her thumbnail-then put the twig in her mouth and hold it there like a cheroot. After a minute she'd toss it away and say, Now kiss me. And her mouth had the sweet sharp taste of birch. In summer, she did the same with the clear drop of liquid at the tip of honeysuckle blossoms, and in the fall with the white pulp of honey-locust pods. And in winter with a dried clove and a broken stick of cinnamon. Now kiss me.

at may's urging, I recently agreed to buy an Edison music machine. The Fireside model. It cost an unimaginable twenty-two dollars. She tells me the way it works is that singers up North holler songs into an enormous metal cone, whereupon their voices are scarified in a thin gyre on a wax cylinder the size of a bean can. I imagine the singers looking as if they are being swallowed by a bear. After digestion, they come out of my corresponding little cone sounding tiny and earnest and far, far away.

May is relentlessly modern, which makes me wonder why she takes care of me, for I am resolutely antique. Her enthusiasm for the movies is beyond measure, though the nearest nickelodeon is half a day's train ride away. Sometimes I give her a few dollars for the train ticket and the movie ticket, with some money left over for dinner along the way. She comes back all excited and full of talk about the thrill of the compact narratives, the inhuman beauty of certain actresses and actors, the magnitude of the images. I have never witnessed a movie other than once in Charleston, when I dropped a nickel into the slot of a kinetoscope viewer and wound the crank until the bell rang and put the sound tubes like a stethoscope to my ears and then bent to the eyepieces. All I perceived were senseless blurs moving tiny across my mind. I could not adjust my eyes to the pictures. Something looked a little like a man, but he seemed to have a dozen arms and legs and seemed not to occupy any specific world at all but just a grey fog broken by looming vague shapes. For all I could determine of his surroundings, the man might have been playing baseball or plowing a cornfield, or maybe boxing in a ring. I lost interest in the movies at that point.

But I understand that a movie has been made about my earlier life, and May described it to me in enthusiastic detail after it played in the nearest town. The title of it is The White Chief. I didn't care to see it. Who wants every bit of life you've ever known boiled down to a few short minutes? I don't need prompting. Memories from those way-back times flash up with great particularity-even individual trees, dead since long before the War, remain standing in my mind with every leaf etched distinct down to the pale palmate veins, their whole beings meaningful and bright with color. So why choose to enter that distressing grey cinema fog only to find some lost unrecognizable phantom of yourself moving through a vague and uncertain world?

in summer i still rally myself to go to the Warm Springs Hotel, a place I have frequented for more than half a century. Sometimes at the Springs I'm introduced to people who recognize my name, and I can see the incredulity on their faces. This example I'm about to tell happened last summer and will have to stand as representative for a number of similar occurrences.

A prominent family from down in the smothering part of the state had come up to the mountains to enjoy our cool climate. The father was a slight acquaintance of mine, and the son was a recently elected member of the state house. The father was young enough to be my child. They found me sitting on the gallery, reading the most recent number of a periodical-The North American Review to be specific, for I have been a subscriber over a span of time encompassing parts of eight decades.

The father shook my hand and turned to his boy. He said, Son, I want you to meet someone. I'm sure you will find him interesting. He was a senator and a colonel in the War. And, most romantically, white chief of the Indians. He made and lost and made again several fortunes in business and land and railroad speculation. When I was a boy, he was a hero. I dreamed of being half the man he was.

Something about the edge to his tone when he said the words chief, colonel, and senator rubbed me the wrong way. It suggested something ironic in those honorifics, which, beyond the general irony of everything, there is not. I nearly said, Hell, I'm twice the man you are now, despite our difference in age, so things didn't work out so bright for your condescending hopes. And, by the way, what other than our disparity of age confers upon you the right to talk about me as if I'm not present? But I held my tongue. I don't care. People can say whatever they want to about me when I've passed. And they can inflect whatever tone they care to use in the telling.

The son said, He's not Cooper, is he? He blurted it out and was immediately sorry to sound completely ridiculous.

Even to me it sounded ridiculous. Almost as if the boy had asserted that Daniel Boone or Crockett yet lived. Perhaps Natty Bumppo. Some mythic relic of the time when the frontier ran down the crest of the Blue Ridge and most of the country was a sea of forest and savanna and mountains prowled by savage Indians. A time of long rifles and bears as big as railcars. Bloodthirsty wolves and mountain lions. Days of yore when America was no more than a strip of land stretching a couple of hundred miles west of the Atlantic and the rest was just a very compelling idea. I represented an old America of coonskin hats erupting into the now of telephones and mile-a-minute automobiles and electric lights and moving pictures and trains.

Maybe there is an odor of must and camphor about me. But I live on. My eyes are quick and blue behind the folded grey lids. I am amazed by their brightness every time I gather courage to look in the mirror, which is seldom. How possible that any living thing from that distant time yet survives?

I could see in the son's expression that he was doing the arithmetic in his head, working the numbers. And then his face lit up when he realized that it summed.

I am not impossible, just very old.

I reached out my hand to shake and said, Will Cooper, live and in person.

He shook my hand and said something respectful about my awfully long and varied life.

Excerpted from Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier Copyright © 2006 by Charles Frazier. Excerpted by permission of Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.