Where to start with Cormac McCarthy

American novelist, 1933–2023. Won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1992 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007.

Best Cormac McCarthy book to start with: The Road (2006), on 8 of the 13 lists it could have made.

The Road is the usual way in to McCarthy. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, it is short, and it is very bleak. A father and his young son walk across a ruined America, and the sentences are bare. Pick a moment when you can take it.

All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award in 1992. It is the best choice if you want something more traditional: a teenager rides from Texas into Mexico in the 1940s with a friend, and it has the shape of a classic Western with a love story in it. It is warmer than The Road, and much easier going than Blood Meridian.

Blood Meridian is the most violent of the three. It follows a band of scalp hunters on the Mexican border in the 1850s, and it is written in a high, strange style. McCarthy does not use quotation marks, which takes a few pages to get used to. Read it last, once you have a feel for his prose.