Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian follows a fourteen-year-old runaway from Tennessee, known only as the Kid, as he drifts into the hostile borderlands between Texas and Mexico. He is swept up by the Glanton gang, scalp hunters who prey on Indigenous Americans, and the violence around him escalates under the presence of Judge Holden, a huge, hairless, learned and utterly cold figure who seems as much myth as man.

Cormac McCarthy's prose is the real astonishment here, shifting from spare to ornate, almost scriptural, while carrying scenes of appalling brutality across a desert rendered with terrible beauty. The publisher describes it as a brilliant subversion of the Western and a blazing example of the form at once. It is a book for readers with a strong stomach who want American fiction at its darkest and most ambitious.