Shelfology Book Pairing

Or the Evening Redness in the West

by Cormac McCarthy

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

by James Clavell

The sweeping epic novel of the founding of Hong Kong, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author and unparalleled master of historical fiction, James Clavell “There can only be one Tai-Pan.” Dirk Struan rose from humble beginnings to build Struan & Company, also known as the Noble House, into the world’s largest Far East trading company. He is now the Tai-Pan—Supreme Leader—of all Tai-Pans in China. Along the way, however, he made a powerful enemy. Tyler Brock, Struan’s rival from their early opium-smuggling days, also heads a large trading fleet, second in size only to Struan’s. But it is not only silks and spices that drive their mutual companies’ wealth—the opium trade is still booming. War between England and China might be over, but the hostilities remain. Struan and Brock come to control much of England’s trade with China yet neither can control their desires or their hatred of each other. Over the years, their two families will cross paths, threatening to rip both apart, with reverberations that will echo across the generations. Struan must fight to save his company and his family, or risk seeing everything he has created destroyed at the hands of his sworn enemy. Ambition, political intrigue, and love and lust weave their way throughout the novel the New York Times called, “grand entertainment...packed with action...with blood and sin, treachery and conspiracy, sex and murder.” East and West come together in an opulent and intricately plotted narrative. A tour-de-force of historical fiction, rich in detail yet eminently readable, Tai-Pan will stay with you long after the final page.