M Allen Cunningham's debut novel The Green Age of Asher Witherow, set in 19th-century Northern California, was shortlisted for the 2005 Booksense Book of the Year Award alongside Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America.
As a novelist, Cormac McCarthy is many things: heir to the Southern gothic tradition, reviver of Celtic lyricism, metaphysical speculator, master comic, eschewer of punctuation, and re
