Books like

Books like No Country for Old Men

12 books with a reading profile close to No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Balanced in tone; a moderate read.

  1. 1 Birnam Wood

    Birnam Wood

    by Eleanor Catton

    thriller, narrative

    Mira Bunting leads Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand that plants crops on private land to challenge property rights.

  2. 2 The North Water

    The North Water

    by Ian McGuire

    thriller, narrative

    In 1859, Patrick Sumner, a disgraced former army surgeon from the Indian Mutiny, signs on as medic aboard the whaling ship Volunteer, bound for the Arctic.

  3. 3 State of Wonder

    State of Wonder

    by Ann Patchett

    thriller, narrative

    Pharmacology researcher Marina Singh travels from Minnesota to the Amazon basin to investigate the death of a colleague and the status of a long-delayed drug project.

  4. 4 Penance

    Penance

    by Eliza Clark

    thriller, narrative

    Set in the seaside town of Crow-on-Sea, this novel uses a fictional true-crime format to document the murder of sixteen-year-old Joan Wilson.

  5. 5 The Beach

    The Beach

    by Alex Garland

    thriller, narrative

    Alex Garland’s novel follows Richard, a young British backpacker in Bangkok who acquires a hand-drawn map promising a hidden coastal paradise.

  6. 6 Notes on an Execution

    Notes on an Execution

    by Danya Kukafka

    thriller, narrative

    Ansel Packer sits on Texas death row with twelve hours left before his lethal injection.

  7. 7 Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

    Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

    by Patrick Süskind

    thriller, narrative

    In eighteenth-century France, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born among fish guts with an absolute sense of smell but no natural body odor of his own.

  8. 8 The Guest

    The Guest

    by Emma Cline

    thriller, narrative

    Twenty-two-year-old Alex is cast out of her older boyfriend Simon’s wealthy Long Island home after a breach of etiquette.

  9. 9 A Burning

    A Burning

    by Megha Majumdar

    thriller, narrative

    Set in contemporary Kolkata, the story begins when Jivan, a young Muslim woman living in the slums, posts a comment on Facebook questioning the government’s response to a deadly terrorist attack on a train.

  10. 10 The Other Black Girl

    The Other Black Girl

    by Zakiya Dalila Harris

    thriller, narrative

    Nella Rogers is an editorial assistant and the only Black employee at Wagner Books, a prestigious but white-dominated publishing house in New York City.

  11. 11 A Ladder to the Sky

    A Ladder to the Sky

    by John Boyne

    thriller, narrative

    Maurice Swift is a young waiter with immense literary ambition but zero original ideas.

  12. 12 Leave the World Behind

    Leave the World Behind

    by Rumaan Alam

    thriller, narrative

    Amanda and Clay, a white middle-class couple from Brooklyn, rent a remote vacation home in Long Island with their two teenage children.

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