No Country for Old Men (Vintage International) (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
McCarthy is my favorite author, and this is the novel that introduced me to him. If you're looking for a way to read McCarthy and get a feel for his themes but without his particular brand of violence and horror, this is a good place to start (some of his other novels get real weird).
What I enjoy most about this novel is its concern about morality. You have three main characters who fall somewhere on a moral spectrum: 1) the true center (neither good nor evil) is a ma who found some money, 2) the true evil (who does not believe in his own evilness) who is chasing him to get the money back, and 3) the true good who follows in the wake of the destruction and is dismayed by what he sees. Packed with action, moral and historical philosophy, and McCarthy's raw style, this novel is sure to please.
-Brittni
— From BrittniThe 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.
Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
“A narrative that rips along like hell on wheels [in a] race with the devil [on] a stage as big as Texas.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Expertly staged and pitilessly lighted. It feels like a genuine diagnosis of the postmillennial malady, a scary illumination of the oncoming darkness.” —Time
“A cause for celebration. He is nothing less than our greatest living writer, and this is a novel that must be read and remembered.” —Houston Chronicle