• The Orchard Keeper

  • By: Cormac McCarthy
  • Narrated by: Ed Sala
  • Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (306 ratings)

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The Orchard Keeper  By  cover art

The Orchard Keeper

By: Cormac McCarthy
Narrated by: Ed Sala
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Publisher's 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.

©1965 Cormac McCarthy (P)2013 Recorded Books

What listeners say about The Orchard Keeper

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

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'.

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47 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

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.

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9 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

my review of The Orchard keeper

wonderful book as all his books are, the narration was wonderful and I shall seek him out

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

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.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars
  • K.
  • 06-09-17

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.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Less than usual

It may not be fair to judge a writer against himself when speaking in general terms but this story is less than your typical work. A great story with better than average depth, still, not as strong as his following work.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

First time reading the story

Evidence of future brilliance but it’s prose is a stumbling block in most instances. The religious imagery is a beautifully crafted and his characters have potential but the motivations are not flushed out with the clarity of later novels

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Interesting

A solid debut novel, very interesting in parts, but very dull in others. The plot meanders a bit due to the nature of the vague philosophizing inherent to most of the dialogue, which is either intentional or because the author was wrestling with more than he could handle.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Surprisingly Quaint

The narrator is a perfect fit for this at-times beautiful & poignant story. Learning that this was McCarthy's first novel surprised me, as the prose is fully-realized & is as evocative as some of his best later works. The idiosyncratic characters & the sparsely-detailed descriptions of their behavior make the book feel more real than most contemporary fiction. Given McCarthy's later penchant for Western settings & characters, this early work was a real treat to experience.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Terrible Narration

I have listened to dozens of audiobooks, but I have never felt so angered by listening to another human voice. it wasn't the timbre of the voice, but the cadence that made my ears flee from it in search of literally any other sound in order to escape it. The unnatural pauses between words caused me yo have to rewind countless times in order to understand what I had just heard. It is a shame that such lovely prose had to be read by such an unworthy voice.

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