No Country for Old Men

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 50 BEST THRILLERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses, this is the “profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered” novel (The Washington Post) that inspired the Academy Award®–winning film.

“A narrative that rips along like hell on wheels [on] a stage as big as Texas.”—The New York Times Book Review

The setting is the Texas–Mexico border. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell—can contain.

As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives—McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.

No Country for Old Men is a triumph.