The Orchard Keeper

Cormac McCarthy

Jun 2013 · Recorded Books · Narrated by Ed Sala

About this audiobook

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.

“McCarthy has a voice that is unmistakably his own ... with a passion most writers couldn’t muster or wouldn’t dare.”—The Boston Globe

About the author

Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. He attended the University of Tennessee, but interrupted his studies for four years to join the U.S. Air Force. He died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, N.M., on June 13, 2023. He was 89. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965. His other works include Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian. All the Pretty Horses, the first part of the Border Trilogy, which also includes The Crossing and Cities of the Plains, won the National Book Award in 1992. His novel No Country for Old Men was adapted into a film in 2007. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road. He has also written plays and screenplays.