Blood Meridian

A chaotically violent and hauntingly beautiful novel from one of the greatest American novelists, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning Cormac McCarthy.

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