Blood Meridian

Brutally violent, Blood Meridian is the story of one teenage runaway in the nineteenth-century American South, as a sadistic gang unleashes its massacre across the desert land. It is the work that sealed Cormac McCarthy's reputation as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers - his magnum opus.

'[A] brilliant, uncompromising work of fiction - 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.