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    The Orchard Keeper
    The Orchard Keeper
    The Orchard Keeper
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Orchard Keeper

    Written by Cormac McCarthy

    Narrated by Ed Sala

    4/5

    ()

    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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 14, 2013
    ISBN9781470337117
    The Orchard Keeper
    Author

    Cormac McCarthy

    Cormac McCarthy was the author of many acclaimed novels, including Blood Meridian, Child of God and The Passenger. Among his honours are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country for Old Men – the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. McCarthy died in 2023 in Santa Fe, NM at the age of 89.

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    Reviews for The Orchard Keeper

    4/5

    36 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Before Cormac McCarthy wrote about the American West, he wrote about rural Tennessee. The Orchard Keeper, originally published in 1965, was his first novel. In it, McCarthy originates his style of intertwining nature and the land with violence done by man. Fellow Tennessean William Gay, among others, obviously drew inspiration from McCarthy, without adopting the sometimes wordily dense writing style favored by McCarthy in his early novels.The story revolves around bootleggers in the 1930s and 40s and it meanders beautifully, as does nature, between scenes of the land and rural life, interspersed with the violence surrounding bootlegging and general larceny. His characters veer between well-drawn and commonplace, but move the story along and contribute to the narrative.
    • 4/5
      Having read The Road and Sutree before this, McCarthy's debut novel, I certainly saw motifs and descriptions that re-emerged in those later books. McCarthy is brilliant in rendering landscape, and although I find his characters difficult to grasp it doesn't really matter to me when the writing is this tight and the authors use of a word or phrase transforms the mundane or vicious so superbly. I highly recommend it.
    • 4/5
      McCarthy's writing is like going through a dream where everything is shrouded in a dense fog that slowly lifts to unvail each scene. He is a brilliant writer, and this is evident even from his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, about a young boy and his friendship with a man who runs whiskey in the 1930s. The influence of Faulkner is obvious, yet McCarthy's tale is both true and original.