No Country for Old Men

No Country for Old Men is a novel by the American writer Cormac McCarthy, published in 2005 and set along the Texas-Mexico border in 1980.

McCarthy had written the story first as a screenplay, and the novel keeps the marks of that origin: short scenes, spare dialogue and almost no interior commentary, so that the reader watches three men move towards each other without being told what any of them is thinking. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell narrates some chapters in the first person, and his monologues carry the novel's second subject, which is the distance between the violence he deals with now and the county he grew up in. His passages are the quietest in the book and the most political, since they come from a man who has spent forty years in a job that no longer resembles the one he took. Moss is not a hero; he is competent, stubborn and aware that he has done something with consequences, and the man hunting him has been given almost no backstory, which is what makes him frightening. The title comes from the first line of Yeats's poem Sailing to Byzantium, and the book was adapted by the Coen brothers into the 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards including Best Picture.