Recommendations based on "No Country for Old Men From the bestselling author of The Road"

By the winner of the pulitzer prize for fiction in 2007, this is the story of a father and son walking alone through burned america, heading through the ravaged landscape to the coast. It has been hailed as 'the first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation. Here is an american classic which, at a stroke, makes mccarthy a contender for the nobel prize for literature . . an absolutely wonderful book that people will be reading for generations' andrew o’hagan harvey weinstein's film was released in the uk on 8 january 2010 with an all-star cast including viggo mortensen, charlize theron, guy pearce and robert duvall, and introducing major new young talent, kodi smit mcphee, with a soundtrack by nick cave and warren ellis. ‘a work of such terrible beauty that you will struggle to look away’ tom gatti, the times ‘so good that it will devour you, in parts. It is incandescent’ niall griffiths, daily telegraph ‘you will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled, mesmeris

Brutally violent, Blood Meridian is the story of one teenage runaway in the nineteenth-century American South, as a sadistic gang unleashes its massacre across the desert land. It is the work that sealed Cormac McCarthy's reputation as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers - his magnum opus. '[A] brilliant, uncompromising work of fiction - imagine if the authors of the King James Bible, their hands guided by Satan, wrote a western' - The Times 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. A group known as the Glanton gang hunt Indigenous Americans, collecting scalps as their bloody trophies. At the centre of this violence stands Judge Holden: a massive, hairless man, mysterious if not supernatural, erudite and cold-blooded. He is singularly extreme in his sadistic violence. But the apparent chaos is not without order - the Glanton gang, too, are stalked as prey. Read as both a brilliant subversion of the Western novel and a blazing example of that form, it is a powerful, mesmerizing and savagely beautiful novel - and one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century. 'In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reaches the peak of his style: spare and ornate at once, repetitious but endlessly readable' - Guardian Praise for Cormac McCarthy: '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 '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 '[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 Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

The prequel to Comanche Moon, depicting the adventures of Woodrow McCall and Gus McCrae as young men adrift in the Old West.

A Globe & Mail 100 SelectionPart epic of Texas, part classic coming- of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claimSpring, 1849. The first male child born in the newly established Republic of Texas, Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanches storms his homestead and brutally murders his mother and sister, taking him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to life among the Comanches, learning their ways and language, answering to a new name, becoming the chief's adopted son, and waging war against their enemies, including white men—which complicates his sense of loyalty and understanding of who he is. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone. Neither white nor Indian, civilized nor fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong—a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny.Intertwined with Eli's story are those of his son, Peter, a man who bears the emotional cost of his father's drive for power, and Jeannie, Eli's great-granddaughter, a woman who must fight hardened rivals to succeed in a man's world.Philipp Meyer deftly explores how Eli's ruthlessness and steely pragmatism transform subsequent generations of McCulloughs. Love, honor, even children are sacrificed in the name of ambition as the family becomes one of the richest powers in Texas, a ranching-and-oil dynasty of unsurpassed wealth and privilege. Yet, like all empires, the McCulloughs must eventually face the consequences of their choices. Harrowing, panoramic, and vividly drawn, The Son is a masterful achievement from a sublime young talent.

In this stand alone novel, Andrew Livingston, scion of a New York banking family, goes West to the Bad Lands and encounters dangerous territory, a bitter range war and the clash of ideals and dreams of the Dakota Territory settlers.

Beautiful and brutal, two young cowboys come of age in The Border Trilogy - Cormac McCarthy's award-winning requiem for the American frontier. 'A landmark in American literature' - Guardian With an introduction from Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room. During the middle of the twentieth century, two teenage boys leave their childhoods behind across the US-Mexico border. John Grady Cole will search for his future to the south, a friend by his side, finding adventure and barbarism in the vanishing world of the Old West. Billy Parnham, after deciding not to kill her, will be drawn to the mountains of Mexico accompanied by a lone, pregnant wolf. When the two boys come together as men, in the trilogy's final volume, a dangerous chain of events will bring this story to its savage, inevitable conclusion. A stunning saga of loyalty and love, filled equally with sorrow and humour, The Border Trilogy is a powerful story of two friends growing up in a world where blood and violence are conditions of life. 'In these three fierce, desolate, beautiful novels, McCarthy has created a masterpiece' - Sunday Times This edition collects all three novels in the Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. 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

In Lonely on the Mountain, Louis L’Amour’s solitary wandering Sackett brothers make a stand together—to save one of their own.The rare letters Tell Sackett received always had trouble inside. And the terse note from his cousin Logan is no exception. Logan faces starvation or a hanging if Tell can’t drive a herd of cattle from Kansas to British Columbia before winter. To get to Logan, he must brave prairie fires, buffalo stampedes, and Sioux war parties. But worse trouble waits, for a mysterious enemy shadows Sackett’s every move across the Dakotas and the Canadian Rockies. Tell Sackett has never abandoned another Sackett in need. He will bring aid to Logan—or die trying.

Louis L’Amour takes William Tell Sackett on a treacherous passage from the Arizona goldfields to the booming town of Los Angeles. Tell Sackett was no ladies’ man, but he could spot trouble easily enough. And Dorinda Robiseau was the kind of trouble he wanted to avoid at any time—even more so when he had thirty pounds of gold in his saddlebags and a long way to travel. But when she begged him for safe passage to Los Angeles, Sackett reluctantly agreed. Now he’s on a perilous journey through the most brutal desert on the continent, traveling with a companion he doesn’t trust . . . and headed for a confrontation with a deadly gunman who also bears the name of Sackett.

"The reading experience of a lifetime ..."--The Washington Post The National Book Award winner takes readers inside the epic fighting retreat of the Nez Perce Indians In this new installment in his acclaimed series of novels examining the collisions between Native Americans and European colonizers, William T. Vollmann tells the story of the Nez Perce War, with flashbacks to the Civil War. Defrauded and intimidated at every turn, the Nez Perces finally went on the warpath in 1877, subjecting the U.S. Army to its greatest defeat since Little Big Horn as they fled from northeast Oregon across Montana to the Canadian border. Vollmann's main character is not the legendary Chief Joseph, but his pursuer, General Oliver Otis Howard, the brave, shy, tormented, devoutly Christian Civil War veteran. In this novel, we see him as commander, father, son, husband, friend, and killer. Teeming with many vivid characters on both sides of the conflict, and written in an original style in which the printed page works as a stage with multiple layers of foreground and background, The Dying Grass is another mesmerizing achievement from one of the most ambitious writers of our time.

In 2005, Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men, was published to wide acclaim, and in 2007, Ethan and Joel Coen brought their adaptation of McCarthy's novel to the screen. The film earned praise from critics worldwide and was honored with four Academy Awards', including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. In No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film, scholars offer varied approaches to both the novel and the award-winning film. Beginning with several essays dedicated entirely to the novel and its place within the McCarthy canon, the anthology offers subsequent essays focusing on the film, the adaptation process, and the Coen Brothers more broadly. The book also features an interview with the Coen brothers' long-time cinematographer Roger Deakins. This entertaining and enriching book for readers interested in the Coen Brothers' films and in McCarthy's fiction is an important contribution to both literature and film studies.