Child of God cover art

Child of God

Preview
Try Premium Plus free
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Access to thousands of additional audiobooks and Originals from the Plus Catalogue.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Child of God

By: Cormac McCarthy
Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
Try Premium Plus free

Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $15.99

Buy Now for $15.99

About this listen

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.

©2010 Cormac McCarthy (P)2013 Recorded Books LLC
Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic Reviews

"A powerful and talented writer, able to elicit compassion for his protagonist however terrible his actions" ( Sunday Times)
"McCarthy charts the terrible decline of Lester Ballard with passion, tenderness, eloquence, and a humour which…is attuned perfectly to the bitter wryness of the South." ( Times Literary Supplement)
"His prose, unfailingly beautiful and exact, carries us into a dreamworld of astonishing and violent revelation" (Tobias Wolff)
All stars
Most relevant  
One of the best audiobooks I've listened to. Impeccably narrated. Cormac McCarthy is the best.

Haunting and lyrically brilliant

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I so enjoyed McCarthy’s powerful ability of painted words of story telling disturbia. Could not release the book.

Simply Brilliant and Frightening.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

A bleak, grim and depressing tale of a psychotic mass murderer in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee in the mid-1960s. The story is told for the most part from the perspective of the murderer. Lester Ballard, a misanthropic killer who shoots people at random, arranges the bodies in a tomb like cave where he lives and has sex with the corpses. Hard to know what the point of it all was. Makes McCathy’s later novel The Road seem like Bertie Wooster. Not recommended.

Bleak

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.