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.

“Profoundly disturbing and gorgeously renderedÉ. The most accessible of all his works.” –Washington Post

“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 lightedÉ. It feels like a genuine diagnosis of the postmillennial malady, a scary illumination of the oncoming darkness.” –Time

“A cause for celebrationÉ. He is nothing less than our greatest living writer, and this is a novel that must be read and remembered.” –Houston Chronicle


From the Trade Paperback edition.