Cold Mountain

Simply outstanding.

...
Side note: It only took about 100 pages to get used to the way he writes dialogue. He, like some others (Cormac McCarthy comes to mind) greatly reduce the punctuation used and no quotation marks at all. Frazier is such a strong writer though that unless you approach the book casually, you don't often get lost in the narrative. Still, it took me some time to adapt to the style.