Reading Order
No Country for Old MenMcCarthy No Country for Old Men Reading Order
Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (2005) is his most plot-driven and most widely read novel — a thriller set in the Texas-Mexico borderlands in 1980 in which a welder named Llewelyn Moss finds a satchel of drug cartel money at the scene of a massacre and sets in motion a pursuit by Anton Chigurh, a killer who has made a philosophical system of his nihilism, and by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, an aging lawman who watches the violence with the helpless grief of a man who knows his time is over. The novel — and the Coen Brothers' 2007 film adaptation — gave Chigurh to popular culture as one of its great demonic figures. McCarthy strips his prose to its absolute minimum: no quotation marks, no adverbs, no interiority, only action and dialogue and the landscape. The result is one of the most purely readable of his novels, and one of the most disturbing.
Where to start
No Country for Old Men
Complete No Country for Old Men Book List
- 1Buy
No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy·2005·Start here — Moss, Chigurh, and Sheriff Bell, the most accessible of McCarthy's late novels. - 2Buy
The Road
Cormac McCarthy·2006·McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize novel — a father and son crossing a post-apocalyptic America, written in the same stripped prose. - 3Buy
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy·1985·McCarthy's most ambitious and difficult novel — the Kid and Judge Holden crossing the 1850s borderlands in pure violence. - 4Buy
All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy·1992·The more lyrical McCarthy — John Grady Cole in Mexico, the first of the Border Trilogy. - 5Buy
Outer Dark
Cormac McCarthy·1968·Early McCarthy — the Appalachian Gothic before the border novels, dark and formally accomplished.
No Country for Old Men — Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to read McCarthy in any particular order?
No — each novel is entirely self-sufficient. No Country for Old Men and The Road are the most accessible; Blood Meridian is the most ambitious and difficult. Many readers start with All the Pretty Horses, the most lyrical; others start with The Road, the most emotionally direct.
What is No Country for Old Men about, beyond the plot?
Sheriff Bell's sections — the monologues that frame the thriller plot — are the novel's real subject: an old man's grief at the violence and meaninglessness of the modern world, his sense that something has gone wrong in America that cannot be named or reversed. The thriller is inside a meditation on moral collapse.
How does the film compare to the novel?
The Coen Brothers' adaptation is unusually faithful — one of the best novel-to-film translations in recent American cinema. The ending of both is identically abrupt and ambiguous, which disappointed many viewers expecting resolution. The novel adds Bell's italicized internal monologues, which the film condenses.
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