Yol
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
Science fiction HorrorContemporary fictionLiterary fiction
A father and his son walk south through a burned America, carrying a pistol and a fire that has to mean something. Spare, terrifying, tender.
Feels like tenderness and dread. About love and morality.
A page from the book
What it feels like to describe something you know is already gone.
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. Cormac McCarthy.The novel won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. McCarthy's son John Francis was born when the author was sixty-six, and the book is dedicated to him.
Books that feel like this
More by Cormac McCarthy
The Road
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
A father and son walk south through a burned America with a shopping cart, a pistol and the rule to keep going.
Σάτρι
Cormac McCarthy, 1965
A river town, a fisherman, and a figure called the satyr: McCarthy's first novel, a dark, lyrical drift through water, poverty and the grotesque.
Ο δρόμος
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
A father and son cross a devastated world, carrying the fragile work of staying alive—and of remaining human.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- What is Yol like?
- Feels like tenderness and dread. About love and morality.
- What should I read after Yol?
- If you liked Yol, try For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway), They Both Die at the End (Adam Silvera) and Redeeming Love (Francine Rivers).
A taste of the feed
The inventory a man takes once dying has stopped frightening him.
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.
For Whom the Bell Tolls · Ernest Hemingway
The difference between being someone’s partner and someone’s god.
No, you won’t. And I won’t be enough for you, Amanda. I don’t want to be the center of your life. I want to be part of it. I want to be your husband, not your god. People can’t always be there for you, no matter how much they want to be. And that includes me.
Redeeming Love · Francine Rivers
The seductive idea of death as a silent library where nothing is asked of you.
Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth’s wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death. How would that be? Just how would that be?
The Long Walk · Richard Bachman
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