Charles Frazier

Charles Frazier writes historical fiction attentive to landscape, craft, and the ways national events enter private lives. Raised in western North Carolina, he earned a doctorate in English and became widely known through Cold Mountain, winner of the National Book Award. Ecco published The Trackers in 2023 as his fifth novel. Set during the Depression, it sends painter Val Welch to rural Wyoming on a New Deal commission to create a post-office mural. Rancher John Long and his wife Eve host him, but Eve soon leaves with a valuable painting and Val is asked to find her. His search crosses Hooverville settlements, western cities, Florida wetlands, and competing versions of Eve's past. Frazier uses the journey to consider public art, class, reinvention, and the stories people tell to survive economic upheaval. The Trackers expands his customary interest in American terrain beyond Appalachia while retaining the patient historical detail and morally unsettled travel narrative associated with his earlier novels Thirteen Moons and Varina.