What a great writer, I've become a big fan. This is my fourth McCarthy book and I just love his style, his stories, the way he describes desert country...darkness all round, but so good...
Does anyone know if McCarthy is still writing? I would love a new book....

McCarthy pares his descriptions down to the purest bones, and then, as if all that surrounded it was the shrapnel of a shattering revelation, lays down a jaw-droppingly astonishing sentence that sums up good, evil, man, God, love.

The best and worst in men are inseparable in McCarthy's worlds, which are so exactly imagined as to be indisputable.

John Grady Cole is one of the most memorable heros in contemporary literature.

This one makes me want to ride out across the dust.

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He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in the headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

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Stunning, gorgeous, glorious - really, all superlatives just sound like meaningless gush in the face of this book. On one level this is a coming of age/loss of innocence story as John Grady Cole, half boy, half man, leaves his home in 1950s Texas driven by ideals and a longing for the anachronistic lifestyle of his cowboy ancestors; but look deeper and this offers up more profound reflections of life sandwiched between the two deaths that open and close this novel. This kind of mirroring is everywhere, from the candle and its reflection at the start, and forces us to attend to the other repetitions that structure the narrative: Alejandra and her greataunt's aborted love stories, the imprisonment of John Grady's father foreshadowing his own, the fact that the book doesn't end with his return home but with a second departure on horseback out of Texas.

But what makes the book is McCarthy's incandescent prose: intense, weighted, brooding and magnificent. Smallest actions are freighted with significance, speech is restrained and laconic but hides depths of meaning and emotion. There are debates here about love and death, about religion and destiny, politics and love, nature and culture, what it means to kill and to survive. The tone is epic, in a literary sense as well as a popular one, with cadences that recall mythic narratives and the bible.

For a brief time John Grady finds himself in a kind of prelapsarian Edenic paradise but the fall has to come and he is sent into exile with no Eve by his side. At the same time there are quest motifs and even a reference to Don Quixote whose attempt to live life according to the contours of picaresque romance confront him with the chasm between literature and life.

Mesmerising, horrific, tense, beautiful, painful - this is utterly flawless as it moves inexorably to its inevitable end.