''One of the greatest American novels of this or any other time'' - Guardian GOD. TRUTH. EXISTENCE.
Stella Maris is the story of a mathematician, twenty years old, admitted to the hospital with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag and one request: She does not want to talk about her brother.
Adapted by the Coen Brothers into an Academy Award winning film, No Country For Old Men is a dark and suspenseful novel from Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road . Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles upon a transaction gone horribly wrong. Finding bullet-ridden bodies, several kilos of heroin, and a caseload of cash, he faces a choice - leave the scene as he found it, or cut the money and run. Choosing the latter, he knows, will change everything. And so begins a terrifying chain of events, in which each participant seems determined to answer the question that one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life? This edition is part of the Picador Collection, a new list of the best in contemporary literature published in Picador''s 50th Anniversary year. McCarthy''s eagerly anticipated new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris , will be published by Picador in October 2022.
In this semi-autobiographical work, a man abandons his life of privilege to live among eccentrics, criminals and the impoverished of Knoxville. Suttree is a humorous, compelling tapestry of life on the edge from Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and Blood Meridian.
''Suttree contains a humour that is Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair'' - Times Literary Supplement
1951. Cornelius Suttree lives alone, exiled on a disintegrating houseboat on the wrong side of the Tennessee River. As we meet him, Suttree watches the police haul the body of a suicidal man from the water. Amongst the living, the river is home to hermits, sex workers, alcoholics - and a witch.
Conjuring James Joyce''s Ulysses, Suttree wanders the river with a detachment and wry humour, encountering a broad cast of humanity as he does - even as dereliction and destitution threaten the last of his remaining dignity.
''Suttree is like a good, long scream in the ear'' - New York Times
Praise for Cormac McCarthy:
''McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute'' - Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren
''His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power'' - Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series
''[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence'' - Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain
The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road returns with the first of a two-volume masterpiece: The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, a
With an introduction by Philipp Meyer The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Set in the anarchic world opened up by America''s westward expansion, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic and potent account of the barbarous violence that man visits upon man. Through the hostile landscape of the Texas-Mexico border wanders the Kid, a fourteen year-old Tennessean who is quickly swept-up in the relentless tide of blood. But the apparent chaos is not without its order: while Americans hunt Indians - collecting scalps as their bloody trophies - they too are stalked as prey. Since its first publication in 1985, Blood Meridian has been read as both a brilliant subversion of the Western novel and a blazing example of that form. Powerful and savagely beautiful, it has emerged as one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century. A truly mesmerising classic. ''A bloody and starkly beautiful tale'' Sunday Times ''Unlike anything I have read in recent years, an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement'' John Banville
1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot''s flightbag, the plane''s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit - by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous bar rooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.
John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood. The first volume in McCarthy''s legendary Border Trilogy, All The Pretty Horses is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about childhood passing, along with innocence and a vanished American age. Steeped in the wisdom that comes only from loss, it is a magnificent parable of responsibility, revenge and survival. This edition is part of the Picador Collection, a new list of the best in contemporary literature published in Picador''s 50th Anniversary year. McCarthy''s eagerly anticipated new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris , will be published by Picador in October 2022.
The Crossing forms the second part of Cormac McCarthy''s critically acclaimed Border Trilogy, a story that began with All the Pretty Horses and concludes with Cities of the Plain . Set on the south-western ranches in the years before the Second World War, Cormac McCarthy''s The Crossing follows the fortunes of sixteen-year-old Billy Parham and his younger brother Boyd. Fascinated by an elusive wolf that has been marauding his family''s property, Billy captures the animal - but rather than kill it, sets out impulsively for the mountains of Mexico to return it to where it came from. When Billy comes back to his own home he finds himself and his world irrevocably changed. His loss of innocence has come at a price, and once again the border beckons with its desolate beauty and cruel promise. '' The Crossing is like a river in full spate: beautiful and dangerous'' The Times This edition is part of the Picador Collection, a new list of the best in contemporary literature published in Picador''s 50th Anniversary year. McCarthy''s eagerly anticipated new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris , will be published by Picador in October 2022.
In Cities of the Plain , two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together, between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to confront a country changing beyond recognition. In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north by the military. On the southern horizon are the mountains of Mexico, where one of the men is drawn again and again, in this story of friendships and passion, to a love as dangerous as it is inevitable. ''In a lovely and terrible landscape of natural beauty and impending loss we find John Grady; a young cowboy of the old school, trusted by men and horses, and a fragile young woman, whose salvation becomes his obsession . . . McCarthy makes the sweeping plains a miracle'' Scotsman ''This haunting, deeply felt novel completes one of the literary masterworks of the 1990s'' Daily Telegraph ''The completed trilogy emerges as a landmark in American literature'' Guardian This edition is part of the Picador Collection, a new list of the best in contemporary literature published in Picador''s 50th Anniversary year. McCarthy''s eagerly anticipated new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris , will be published by Picador in October 2022.
B>With an introduction by novelist Rachel Kushner/b>In the vanishing world of the Old West, two cowboys begin an epic adventure, and their own coming-of-age stories. In All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole's search for a future takes him across the Mexican border to a job as a ranch hand and an ill-fated romance. The Crossing is the story of sixteen-year-old Billy Parham, who sets off on a perilous journey across the mountains of Mexico, accompanied only by a lone wolf. Eventually the two come together in Cities of the Plain, in a stunning tale of loyalty and love.A true classic of American literature, The Border Trilogy is Cormac McCarthy's award-winning requiem for the American frontier. Beautiful and brutal, filled equally with sorrow and humour, it is a powerful story of two friends growing up in a world where blood and violence are conditions of life.
A dark, nihilistic tale, Cormac McCarthy''s second novel Outer Dark sees brother and sister wander separately through a countryside scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers.
In an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century, a woman named Rinthy bears her brother''s child.
The brother, Culla, abandons the baby in the woods, and tells Rinthy that the he has died by natural causes. When she sees his grave empty, she sets forth alone to find her son.
Wracked by sin, Culla too leaves for the countryside. He will be haunted by The Trio, punishers and murderers, as the novel moves towards its eerie, apocalyptic resolution.
''A profound parable that ultimately speaks to any society in any time'' - Time
Praise for Cormac McCarthy:
''McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute'' - Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren
''His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power'' - Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series
''[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence'' - Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain
McCarthy charts the terrible decline of Lester Ballard with passion, tenderness, eloquence, and a humour which, at its best, is attuned perfectly to the bitter wryness of the South.>
Full of rich dialogue, Cormac McCarthy's insightful and philosophical play, The Sunset Limited, probes the deepest questions of human existence.A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. In that small apartment, 'Black' and 'White', as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history - mining the origins of two diametrically opposing world views, they begin a dialectic redolent of the best of Beckett. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men - though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life. Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deeply intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.
The story of John Grady Cole, who at 16 finds himself at the dying end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. He escapes to Mexico with friends, but what begins as a comic adventure, leads to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
The first original screenplay by the great American novelist Cormac McCarthy, author of The Road and No Country for Old Men. Now a major motion picture from Twentieth Century Fox.
Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, The Orchard Keeper is an early classic from one of America's finest and most celebrated authors. It tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father. Cormac McCarthy's debut novel is a magnificent evocation of an American landscape, and of a lost American time.
The original screenplay, The Gardener's Son, is the tale of two families: the wealthy Greggs, who own the local cotton mill, and the McEvoys, a family of mill workers beset by misfortune.Two years ago, Robert McEvoy was involved in an accident that led to the amputation of his leg. Consumed by bitterness and anger, he quit his job at the mill and fled. Now, news of his mother's terminal illness brings Robert home. What he finds on his return stokes the slow burning rage he carries within him, a fury that ultimately consumes both the McEvoys and the Greggs.This taut, riveting drama was Cormac McCarthy's first written screenplay. Directed by Richard Pearce, it was produced as a two-hour film in 1976 and received two Emmy Award nominations. This is the first UK publication of the film script in book form.
A beautiful, limited edition slipcase containing Cormac McCarthy''s two-book masterpiece The Passenger 1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot''s flightbag, the plane''s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit - by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous bar rooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness. Stella Maris 1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia''s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger , a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.
