Other editions of book All The Pretty Horses

"What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and heat of the blood that ran them. All his reerence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise." --from All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy is a quiet, unassuming presence in American fiction today, but like the slow, measured voices of many of his characters, he speaks with an authority and conviction that demands an audience. All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy's sixth novel, is a cowboy odyssey for modern times. Set in the late 1940s, it features the travels and toils of a 16-year-old East Texan named John Grady Cole, caught in the agonizing purgatory between adolescence and adulthood. At the start of the novel, Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico. Cole's coming-of-age become inextricably tied to the physical and metaphorical horse. It is his transport into and out of an unknown, often cruel land, and at the hacienda, it becomes his means of survival and identity. It is present even in the opening moments of his love affair with Alejandra, where the flanks of Alejandra's chestnut mare serve as a kind of picket fence across which the young lovers speak their first tentative words of introduction. All the Pretty Horses takes as its model other great bildungsroman tales, or apprenticeship novels, from Great Expectations to Huckleberry Finn. In spite of its hard realities and spare telling, it is a lyrical and richly romantic story, chronicling along with the erosion of the frontier, the loss of an era

This is volume one of the "Border" triology. John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood. "All The Pretty Horses" is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about childhood passing, along with innocence and a vanished American age. Steeped in the wisdom that comes only from loss, it is a magnificent parable of responsibility, revenge and survival. 'A darkly shining work ...executed with consummate skill and much subtlety the effect is magnificent' - John Banville, "Observer". 'A uniquely brilliant book ...told in language as subtly beautiful as its desert setting. One of the most important pieces of American writing of our time' - Stephen Amidon, "Sunday Times".

All the Pretty Horses - the first volume of the Borders Trilogy - tells of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers. Across the border Mexico beckons - beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With two companions, he sets off on an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.