Cormac McCarthy is now the greatest American novelist - The Times It's 1849 and the 14-year-old nameless "kid" has drifted into the violent life of an outlaw band of bloodthirsty Indian hunters on the Texas-Mexico borders. Grotesque characters play out their roles against an unforgiving landscape. The understated southern drawl is just right, suggesting the symbolic richness of McCarthy's language. - Rachel Redford, The Observer Voiced here with slow deliberation, the nightmarishly enigmatic Judge - a man who declares he feels the personal freedom of birds as a personal insult - is a presence I'm finding horribly difficult to shake. - Bella Todd, Time Out Having thought that no book could ever be as harrowing or as frightening as McCarthy's apocalyptic Pulitzer prize-winning The Road (I finished it at 3am sitting up in bed with the light on), here's an even bleaker story about man's inhumanity to man. It's set in the familiar Tex-Mex territory of All the Pretty Horses, his best book, and its hero, 'the kid', like John Grady Cole, is a 16-year-old drifter who pretty much lives in the saddle. There, alas, the resemblance ends - this is definitely not a love story. It's an allegory about survival, lawlessness and natural justice. The kid, who's been living, scavenging, fighting, killing, surviving on his own since he was 12, heads for the Apache wars circa 1840 in the legendary Wild West and joins a troop of mercenaries paid in gold for Indian scalps. The battle scenes are absolutely terrifying. Bullets, arrows, decapitated heads flying, the braves daubed with war paint, some naked, some wearing the looted clothing of their victims - US army jackets, whalebone corsets and ruffled shirts - the Americans by now so blood-crazed and inured to violence that they massacre Indians, Mexican peons and peaceful settlers indiscriminately. McCarthy's prose is compelling, a potent mix of stark and lyrical: 'The night sky lies so spread with stars that there is scarcely space for black at all and they fall all night in bitter arcs and it is so that their numbers are no less. The little prairie wolves cry all night and dawn finds him in the grassy draw where he'd gone to hide from the wind. The hobbled mule stands over him and watches the east for light. The sun that rises is the colour of steel, his mounted shadow falls for miles before him.' Brilliant, but not for the faint-hearted. - Sue Arnold, The Guardian