Staff Reviews

The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by one of America’s finest, most celebrated novelists.  Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, McCarthy tells the story of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy’s father.  Together with Rattner’s Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself. And, as time changes all things, an era has been removed from earth when John Wesley returns later in life and the village has been changed by time:
"They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust." The precision of language is what makes McCarthy one of the great American authors.