This compelling novel has as its protagonist Cornelius Suttree, living alone and in exile in a disintegrating houseboat on the wrong side of the Tennessee River close by Knoxville. He stays at the edge of an outcast community inhabited by eccentrics, criminals and the poverty-stricken. Rising above the physical and human squalor around him, his detachment and wry humour enable him to survive dereliction and destitution with dignity. '"Suttree" contains a humour that is Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor' - "Times Literary Supplement". '"Suttree" marks McCarthy's closest approach to autobiography and is probably the funniest and most unbearably sad of his books' - Stanley Booth. 'The book comes at us like a horrifying flood. The language licks, batters, wounds - a poetic, troubled rush of debris ...Cormac McCarthy has little mercy to spare, for his characters or himself. His text is broken, beautiful and ugly in spots..."Suttree" is like a good, long scream in the ear' - Jerome Charyn, "New York Times".