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.
Reviews
"For forty years, Cormac McCarthy has brought forth literature as important as it is rare.... No Country for Old Men is the most accessible of all his works.... Profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered."
— Jeffrey Lent, The Washington Post
"A sleeker, slimmer linguistic manner and a darting movie-ready narrative that rips along like hell on wheels [in a] race with the devil [on] a stage as big as Texas."
— Walter Kirn, 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 Magazine
"A cause for celebration.... He is nothing less than our greatest living writer, and this is a novel that must be read and remembered, a jeremiad against the depravity that lurks on the horizon, the anguish that burns the borderland of the Americas."
— William J. Cobb, Houston Chronicle
"A zigzagging, riveting frontier tale of fate and flight [told in] a stipped-down, doom-soaked prose that scares you even before anybody rough shows up.... No Country for Old Men is [also] a simple, heartsore story: one of an old Army salt with a daughter he misses and a wife he loves, and a mean-eyed killer who moves the force of RoboCop. The suspense of this conflict is heightened by McCarthy's deadpan patience and the essential fact that we have no idea who will triumph in the end."
— Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe
"Even the spare best of Elmore Leonard would have trouble beating this neo-Western in a foot race.... The book rockets forward like a bullet train...the only demand it places on us is to keep reading."
— John Freeman, The Wall Street Journal
"Riveting.... A harrowing, propulsive drama, cutting from one frightening, violent set piece to another with cinematic economy and precision."
— The New York Times
"This is a monster of a book. Cormac McCarthy achieves monumental results by a kind of drip-by-drip process of ruthless simplicity. It will leave you panting and awestruck."— Sam Shepard
"Perhaps not since Satan vs. God has the battle been so Manichean, so explicit, so clearly drawn as it is in Cormac McCarthy's new novel.... This book moves like shadows over the desert.... Its surge is hot-blooded [and] the momentum of the book is such that the reader is plunged into the action."
— Corey Messler, The Memphis Flyer
"No plot summary will do this novel justice [and] the mystery is more than enough to keep any reader panting.... Cormac McCarthy explores questions of guilt and responsibility, love and moral ambiguity, [and] the way memory informs us.... The best part of the questions the author raises is the business of looking for answers."
— Kit Reed, St. Petersburg Times
"McCarthy's prose [is] the most laudable, his characters the most fully inhabited, his sense of place the most bloodworthy and thoroughly felt of any living writer's."
— Tom Chiarella, Esquire
"As tough and violent as anything he has written...about taking outrageous chances and tempting fate.... He's a genius at building plot [and] one is swept along through the sheer mastery of form."
— David Milofsky, The Denver Post
"A brutally satisfying thriller at its start, No Country for Old Men ends as a rueful, disquieting meditation on the effects of greed and violence."
— Cliff Froehlich, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Electrifying.... [He writes] powerfully of fathers and sons, and of responsibility for oneself, one's family and one's community as a kind of patrimony that the very essence of modernity may have damaged beyond repair, warped beyond recognition, mutated so horrifically that a new kind of man, a soulless, wrecking angel, may not only be loose among us but may be what we are destined to become."
— Arthur Salm, San Diego Union-Tribune
"No Country hits the ground running [and] had this reader cowering in a corner with the lights off.... What unfolds is, in McCarthy's deft, dark, and evocative handling, a death-waltz across Texas.... The prose here is so hard-bitten it'll make your teeth hurt just to crack the binding."
— Duane Davis, Rocky Mountain News
"A terse, hard-hitting blend of prose as masculine and crisp as Hemingway's, characters as iconic as if they stepped out of Shane or High Noon and a story so real it might have been taken from today's headlines."
— Judi Goldenberg, Richmond Times-Dispatch
"Mr. McCarthy's story is so exquisitely harrowing that the reader can forget to breathe."
— Bryan Woolley, Dallas Morning News
"Cormac McCarthy just got better.... No Country for Old Men is almost brutally direct and unpretentious.... His language and his characters' dialogue sound ancestral, a recognizable but exotic analog of American English, [and] absolutely nobody writes about rural and small-town folk better."
— Patrick Beach, Austin-American Statesman
"Shades of Dostoyevsky, Hemingway, and Faulkner resonate in McCarthy's blend of lyrical narrative, staccato dialogue, and action-packed scenes.... Fans will revel in the author's renderings of the raw landscapes of Mexico and the Southwest and the precarious souls scattered along the border that separates the two."
— Allison Block, Booklist (starred review)
"Mesmerizing.... A gripping man-on-the-run sequence relayed in terse, masterful prose [and] a profound meditation on the battle between good and evil and the roles choice and chance play in the shaping of a life."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)