The Orchard Keeper
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4.1 • 67 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed first novel from one of America's most celebrated novelists, the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • Set is a remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it is the story of a young boy and a bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.
The boy, John Wesley Rattner, and the outlaw, Marion Sylder–together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence–enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Published in 1965, Cormac McCarthy’s gorgeously written debut hints at the brilliance of his later novels—the colloquial Southern beauty of Child of God, the inevitable violence of the Border Trilogy, and The Road’s complex father-son dynamic. This hypnotic Prohibition-era story follows a trio of entangled characters: the cantankerously independent orchard keeper Ather Ownby, murderous bootlegger Marion Sylder, and a young boy named John Wesley Rattner. McCarthy weaves an unforgettable coming-of-age story that’s shaded with gothic doom and the otherworldly quality of a fairy tale.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This first novel by McCarthy (whose All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award) is set in a remote Tennessee community between the world wars.
