Excerpt from Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.