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Child of God

By: Cormac McCarthy
Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
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Publisher's Summary

Lester Ballard, a violent, solitary and introverted young backwoodsman, is released from jail and allowed to haunt the hill country of East Tennessee, preying on the population with his strange lusts.

McCarthy transforms commonplace brushes with humanity into stunning scenes of the comic and the grotesque, and as the story hurtles toward its unforgettable conclusion, depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humour, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.

©2010 Cormac McCarthy (P)2013 Recorded Books LLC
Fiction Literary Fiction
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Critic Reviews

"A powerful and talented writer, able to elicit compassion for his protagonist however terrible his actions" ( Sunday Times)
"McCarthy charts the terrible decline of Lester Ballard with passion, tenderness, eloquence, and a humour which…is attuned perfectly to the bitter wryness of the South." ( Times Literary Supplement)
"His prose, unfailingly beautiful and exact, carries us into a dreamworld of astonishing and violent revelation" (Tobias Wolff)

What listeners say about Child of God

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Profile Image for John

Haunting and lyrically brilliant

One of the best audiobooks I've listened to. Impeccably narrated. Cormac McCarthy is the best.

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Profile Image for P

Simply Brilliant and Frightening.

I so enjoyed McCarthy’s powerful ability of painted words of story telling disturbia. Could not release the book.

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Profile Image for Jim Parker

Bleak

A bleak, grim and depressing tale of a psychotic mass murderer in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee in the mid-1960s. The story is told for the most part from the perspective of the murderer. Lester Ballard, a misanthropic killer who shoots people at random, arranges the bodies in a tomb like cave where he lives and has sex with the corpses. Hard to know what the point of it all was. Makes McCathy’s later novel The Road seem like Bertie Wooster. Not recommended.

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