Listen free for 30 days
-
The Orchard Keeper
- Narrated by: Ed Sala
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Classics
People who bought this also bought...
-
Outer Dark
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Ed Sala
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.
-
-
Bleak but riveting
- By hfffoman on 13-11-13
-
Suttree
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 20 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No discussion of great modern authors is complete without mention of Cormac McCarthy, whose rare and blazing talent makes his every work a true literary event. A grand addition to the American literary canon, Suttree introduces readers to Cornelius Suttree, a man who abandons his affluent family to live among a dissolute array of vagabonds along the Tennessee river.
-
-
Sutree
- By Patricia on 23-12-12
-
Child of God
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
An Extraordinary Audio Experience
- By Blind Girl on 25-03-14
-
All the Pretty Horses
- The Border Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Frank Muller
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend, Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilised.... A place where dreams are paid for in blood.
-
-
A very good story with great content.<br />
- By jon on 25-09-16
-
No Country for Old Men
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cormac McCarthy, best-selling author of National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, delivers his first new novel in seven years. Written in muscular prose, No Country for Old Men is a powerful tale of the West that moves at a blistering pace.
-
-
First time author for me
- By M. L. Gibson on 28-05-08
-
Blood Meridian
- Or the Evening Redness in the West
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.
-
-
Visionary, violent, yet redemptive. A masterpiece.
- By Peter Kettle on 07-04-13
-
Outer Dark
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Ed Sala
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.
-
-
Bleak but riveting
- By hfffoman on 13-11-13
-
Suttree
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 20 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No discussion of great modern authors is complete without mention of Cormac McCarthy, whose rare and blazing talent makes his every work a true literary event. A grand addition to the American literary canon, Suttree introduces readers to Cornelius Suttree, a man who abandons his affluent family to live among a dissolute array of vagabonds along the Tennessee river.
-
-
Sutree
- By Patricia on 23-12-12
-
Child of God
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
An Extraordinary Audio Experience
- By Blind Girl on 25-03-14
-
All the Pretty Horses
- The Border Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Frank Muller
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend, Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilised.... A place where dreams are paid for in blood.
-
-
A very good story with great content.<br />
- By jon on 25-09-16
-
No Country for Old Men
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cormac McCarthy, best-selling author of National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, delivers his first new novel in seven years. Written in muscular prose, No Country for Old Men is a powerful tale of the West that moves at a blistering pace.
-
-
First time author for me
- By M. L. Gibson on 28-05-08
-
Blood Meridian
- Or the Evening Redness in the West
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.
-
-
Visionary, violent, yet redemptive. A masterpiece.
- By Peter Kettle on 07-04-13
-
The Road
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2007.
America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst this destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still, they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world of utter devastation.
-
-
Perfect for the road - or anywhere else
- By SKA on 20-09-09
-
The Counsellor
- By: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 3 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Counsellor is the story of a lawyer whose desire to get rich, in order to impress his fiancée, leads him to become involved in a risky drug-smuggling venture. His contacts in the high-stakes cocaine trade are the mysterious Reiner and the seductive Malkina. As the action crosses the Mexican border, things become darker, more violent, and more sexually disturbing than he could ever have imagined.
-
-
This is a screenplay - not a novel
- By Feebee on 27-09-17
-
The Winter of our Discontent
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ethan Hawley has lost the spirit of his wealthy forebears, a long line of proud New England sea captains and Pilgrims. Scarred by failure, Ethan works as a grocery clerk in a store his family once owned. But his wife is restless and his teenage children hungry for the material comforts he cannot provide. Then a series of unusual events reignites Ethan's ambition, and he is pitched on to a bold course, where all scruples are put aside.
-
-
An enjoyable listen to one man's world changing
- By uhhuhlex on 02-02-16
-
Slaughterhouse-Five
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: James Franco
- Length: 5 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).
-
-
Did I Enjoy it or Experience it?
- By Simon on 05-06-17
-
Heart of Darkness: A Signature Performance by Kenneth Branagh
- By: Joseph Conrad
- Narrated by: Kenneth Branagh
- Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A Signature Performance: Kenneth Branagh plays this like a campfire ghost story, told by a haunted, slightly insane Marlow.
-
-
Haunting and beautiful
- By S. Goodyear on 13-04-16
-
Underworld
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
-
-
A modern classic - read it
- By shirley on 30-04-14
-
The Lost Country
- By: William Gay
- Narrated by: T. Ryder Smith
- Length: 15 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Billy Edgewater is a harbinger of doom. Estranged from his family, discharged from the navy and touched by a rising desperation, he sets out hitchhiking home to East Tennessee, where his father is slowly dying. On the road, separately, are Sudy and Bradshaw, brother and sister, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish. All, in one way or another, have their pasts and futures embroiled with D. L. Harkness, a predator in all the ways there are.
-
Ulysses
- By: James Joyce
- Narrated by: Jim Norton
- Length: 27 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ulysses is regarded by many as the single most important novel of the 20th century. It tells the story of one day in Dublin, June 16th 1904, largely through the eyes of Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) and Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman. Both begin a normal day, and both set off on a journey around the streets of Dublin, which eventually brings them into contact with one another.
-
-
Amazing
- By Richard on 02-04-12
-
American Psycho
- By: Bret Easton Ellis
- Narrated by: Nick Landrum
- Length: 17 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Patrick Bateman is 26 and works on Wall Street. He is handsome, sophisticated, charming, and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. And he is taking us to a head-on collision with America's greatest dream - and its worst nightmare...
-
-
a challanging but good listen
- By Mr on 13-04-13
-
Sanctuary
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hard-boiled detective fiction, Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story of the kidnapping of Mississippi debutante Temple Drake. She introduces her own form of venality into the Memphis underworld where she is being held.
-
-
Evil Under The Sun
- By Stephen Gott on 21-01-18
-
Fahrenheit 451
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Tim Robbins
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."
-
-
Fantastic story, worth getting into...
- By Mr on 27-02-17
-
Mother Night
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.
-
-
German anyone???
- By PAOLA on 22-05-14
Summary
One of America’s most celebrated novelists, Cormac McCarthy announced his towering presence on the literary stage with his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. Within the pages of this classic work, John Wesley Rattner, his uncle Ather, and bootlegger Marion Sylder find their lives dangerously entwined in pre-World War II Tennessee. There, the men’s tragedies and struggles are mirrored by the looming specter of industrialization.
More from the same
What listeners say about The Orchard Keeper
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- matt
- 20-10-18
hard work, worth it
Even by McCarthys standards, this feels hard on the reader, he gives you nothing, it's fragmented, and tough to follow the plot (is there even a plot?).
but, as would expect, it is beautifully written, and feels intimately of a time and a place.
-
Overall
- B34VER
- 25-04-19
Not impressed
I didn't really rate this, it seemed to lead nowhere. Shame as some other Cormac McCarthy books are among my favourite books of all time.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Darwin8u
- 12-06-13
Contains the embryo of McCarthy's future greatness
The disadvantage McCarthy has when an obsessive reader finally works back to his first book, is invariably McCarthy will be unfairly graded against his own amazing output. I liked 'Orchard Keeper'. I really did. It was superior in most ways to most writing out there, but it just didn't hold up against other McCarthy. If one considers 'Suttree' and 'Blood Meridian' to be his masterpieces (and thus 5 stars) and 'The Road', 'No Country for Old Men' and 'All the Pretty Horses'/'the Border Trilogy' to be solid pieces of American literature (all 4 stars), it is unavoidable that 'the Orchard Keeper' rates only three.
The great thing about reading this first McCarthy is you can see the germs of all of McCarthy's potential built into it. It contains the embryo of McCarthy's future greatness: great prose, amazing characters, beautiful scenes. If you love McCarthy, don't skip 'the Orchard Keeper', just don't expect it to blow you down, dry you out, and blow you away like 'Blood Meridian' or 'Suttree'.
40 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Mark
- 04-08-19
McCarthy's first novel
This is as dark, complex, and beautiful as McCarthy's other works.
Ed Sala is not a great reader. He stumbles on some sentences, and his hard to understand sometimes. Richard Poe is much better.
6 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- ssharon Miller
- 04-05-18
my review of The Orchard keeper
wonderful book as all his books are, the narration was wonderful and I shall seek him out
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- Tim Martin
- 15-08-20
A tendency to drift
I'm not going to lie - I found this one tougher-going. I've given it 4 stars because I'm a tragic Cormac McCarthy fan, and despite losing the narrative thread several times, the striking prose and rich characterisations alone are worth the price of admission.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- K.
- 09-06-17
not so good
I could not keep up with this book
it just changed courses to many times and I could not stay on track with the storyline.
3 people found this helpful