No Country for Old Men
From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road comes a "profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered" novel (The Washington Post) that returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of the famed Border Trilogy.
The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell—can contain.
As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives—McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
No Country for Old Men is a triumph.
The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell—can contain.
As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives—McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
No Country for Old Men is a triumph.
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Community Reviews
Just as good as the movie. A violent thunderstorm of a thriller full of some of the most detailed accounts of graphic violence pen ever put to paper.
Hardly a wasted word in the entire book. Full of weighty philosophical ideas that many people shy away from less they become crazy.
This was my first foray into the works of Cormac McCarthy. I'd been flailing around a bit in my reading and needed something to jar me free. I'd heard that McCarthy's fiction was dark, but his writing strong so I decided to give this one a try. What I got surprised and delighted me. The novel is a modern day western, violent, but more existential than dark.
The book contains some of the most powerful writing I've encountered in a while. McCarthy is a master of dialog, something amplified here by Tom Stechschulte's remarkable performance in the audiobook edition. McCarthy's characters sound natural, and the dialog is so crisp and smooth that it could be written without standard dialog punctuation. The humor he injects into the book comes almost entirely through dialog, and is more effective because of that.
There is a staccato-like rhythm to McCarthy's writing that is delicious. The action speeds along through a patterns of short and long sentences, the latter powered by a magazine of conjunctions, one after the other, like bullets from a machine gun, with incredible effectiveness.
I would definitely read McCarthy again.
The book contains some of the most powerful writing I've encountered in a while. McCarthy is a master of dialog, something amplified here by Tom Stechschulte's remarkable performance in the audiobook edition. McCarthy's characters sound natural, and the dialog is so crisp and smooth that it could be written without standard dialog punctuation. The humor he injects into the book comes almost entirely through dialog, and is more effective because of that.
There is a staccato-like rhythm to McCarthy's writing that is delicious. The action speeds along through a patterns of short and long sentences, the latter powered by a magazine of conjunctions, one after the other, like bullets from a machine gun, with incredible effectiveness.
I would definitely read McCarthy again.
Another great Cormac McCarthy book. It was a simple read which made me want to fly though it. For being a simple read it had a lot of deep messages. It confronts several issues about making life long decisions , the way our country had taken several wrong truns and even being a coward. I had seen the movie when it first came out and this was like reading the screenplay for most of the movie. I would recommend this to anyone who has seen the movie.
The book was so much better than the movie! Cormac McCarthy's genius is in his ability to weave a complicated tale while remaining neutral, one of the few writers that can effectively waive personal prejudice. Absolutely fascinating.
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