The Orchard Keeper

Cormac McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper is set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars. It 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. All three are heroes of an intense and compelling celebration of values lost to time and industrialization.