Preview "Blood Meridian" in a new window.

Blood Meridian

Book Description

Brutally violent, Blood Meridian is the story of a teenage runaway in the nineteenth-century American South, as a sadistic gang unleashes its massacre across the desert border land.

It is the work that sealed Cormac McCarthy's reputation as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers – his magnum opus.


‘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.



In The Press


About the Author


Read on Your Favourite Devices

to find out more



Ebook Permissions

to find out more

About this Ebook

File formats
This ebook is available in:
The publisher has not yet supplied format information.
Pre-order formats shown are based on publisher intent and may change before release.
File sizes shown are an approximation. The actual download size will vary based on the application you use to read the book.
Publisher
Published
; Copyright:
ISBNs
Title
Series
Author
;
Edition
Imprint
Language
Number of Pages
Page count shown is an approximation provided by the publisher. The actual page count will vary based on various factors such as your device's screen size and font-size.