Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain meets David Guterson’s East of the Mountains in this sweeping historical novel of a Civil War veteran’s last journey on the Pacific Coast. Thirty years after the Civil War’s Battle of the Wilderness left him maimed, Abel Truman has found his way to the rugged, majestic coast of Washington State, where he lives alone in a driftwood shack with his beloved dog. Wilderness is the story of Abel, now an old and ailing man, and his heroic final journey over the snowbound Olympic Mountains. As Abel makes his way into the foothills he his haunted by his memories of the horrors of the war and the savagery he took part in and witnessed. And yet, Abel has somehow managed to hold on to his humanity, finding weigh stations of kindness along his path. In its contrasts of light and dark, wild and tame, brutal and tender, and its attempts to reconcile a horrific war with the great evil it ended, Wilderness not only tells the moving tale of an unforgettable character, but a story about who we are as human beings, a people, and a nation.