The Orchard Keeper is McCarthy's first novel. It is set in the mountains of eastern Tennessee in the early twentieth century and follows three lives that come together: a boy named John Wesley Rattner, an old man who tends an abandoned orchard, and a bootlegger with a violent past. Through them the book shows a rural community and the natural world as they begin to change. The novel is written in a lyrical, Southern gothic style and already shows the interest in landscape, memory and loss that marks his later work.