Pub date set for ''Cold Mountain'' follow-up

It’s been almost 10 years since first-time novelist Charles Frazier published an epic love story set in the Civil War South. Cold Mountain became an international best-seller on its way to winning a National Book Award for Fiction in 1997. Anthony Minghella’s 2003 big-screen adaptation starred Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, earning Renée Zellweger an Oscar. Frazier’s debut novel was such a phenomenon that the author was able to negotiate an $8 million advance from Random House off a one-page outline for his second novel.

Now Random House is announcing that Frazier’s Cold Mountain follow-up, Thirteen Moons, will be published on Oct. 3. According to a statement released exclusively to EW.com, the new book is ”the epic story of one man’s remarkable journey through life, set in nineteenth-century America.”

The next Random House catalog, due to ship April 28, includes the following description of the book:

”At the age of twelve, under the Wind moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home. In a card game with a white Indian named Featherstone, Will wins — for a brief moment — a mysterious girl named Claire, and his passion and desire for her spans this novel. As Will’s destiny intertwines with the fate of the Cherokee Indians — including a Cherokee Chief named Bear — he learns how to fight and survive in the face of both nature and men, and eventually, under the Corn Tassel Moon, Will begins the fight against Washington City to preserve the Cherokee’s homeland and culture. And, he will come to know the truth behind his belief that ‘only desire trumps time.’ Brillianty imagined by a master of American fiction, THIRTEEN MOONS is a stunning novel about a man’s passion for a woman, and how loss, longing, and love can shape a man’s destiny over the many moons of a life.”