Blood Meridian

Description

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. 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. 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 mesmerizing classic.

Cormac McCarthy is the author of many acclaimed novels, including Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country For Old Men and The Road. Among his honours are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

McCarthy distances us not only from the historical past, not only from our cowboy-and-Indian images of it, but also revisionist theories that make white men the villains and Indians the victims. All men are unremittingly bloodthirsty here, poised at a peak of violence, the "meridian" from which their civilization will quickly fall. * New York Times Book Review * Blood Meridian is his masterpiece . . . An astonishing sanguinary epic dealing with the Indian wars of the 1840s in West Texas and Mexico . . . Unlike anything I have ever read in recent years, an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement. -- John Banville * Observer * McCarthy's achievement is to establish a new mythology which is as potent and vivid as that of the movies, yet one which has absolutely the opposite effect . . . He is a great writer. * Independent * A bloody and starkly beautiful tale -- Stephen Amidon * Sunday Times * Possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years. -- Aleksandar Hemon, author of THE LAZARUS PROJECT and NOWHERE MAN Unlike anything I have read in recent years, an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement. -- John Banville I have rarely encountered anything as powerful, as unsettling, or as memorable as Blood Meridian . . . A nightmare odyssey. * Evening Standard *