In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard - a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape-haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
Set in an unnamed part of Appalacia, sometime around the turn of the century, this book is a tale of love and loss. The story begins as a woman bears her brother's child - a boy. He leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth to find him.
Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee, this book tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst of either of them, has killed the boy's father. Together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, the three enact a drama.
With a thirteen major works over a fifty-year career, one that includes a 2007 Pulitzer Prize, selection for Oprah’s Book Club, and Oscar-winning film adaptations of his novels, Cormac McCarthy is one of America’s best-selling novelists of the South and Southwest. Cormac McCarthy offers a shrewd chapter-by-chapter reading, exploring concepts such as the Southern Gothic novel, the Southwest border, faith and suicide, and father-son relationships.
Added by: dovesnake | Karma: 1384.51 | Fiction literature | 12 March 2008
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No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy Book Description
Set in our own time along the bloody frontier between Texas and Mexico, this is Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since Cities of the Plain completed his acclaimed, best-selling Border Trilogy.
Llewelyn
Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot
dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. Packing the
money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more
men are murdered does a victim’s burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the
carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes how desperately Moss
and his young wife need protection. One party in the failed transaction
hires an ex–Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a
mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to
spectacular violence and mayhem. The pursuit stretches up and down and
across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what
one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his
life?
A harrowing story of a war that society is waging on
itself, and an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and
duty that inform lives and shape destinies, No Country for Old Men is a novel of extraordinary resonance and power.