Other editions of book All The Pretty Horses

A stunning film tie-in edition of a classic American novel All the Pretty Horses - the first volume of the Border Trilogy - tells of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers, almost the last American cowboy. 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. The boys' story is a classic adventure from the lost heart of the American Wild West: an adventure that within months will leave one of them dead, and the other two aged beyond any normal reckoning. It is also a grand and epic love story, and a beautifully wise novel about the passing of childhood and the loss of innocence.

Set in 1949, this is the story of John Grady Cole, who, at the age of sixteen, finds himself at the losing end of a long generation of ranchers. His grandfather's death has just cut him off from the only life he has ever imagined wanting. Abandoned by his parents troubles, heading over the border seems the only way out of a society moving in all of the wrong directions so, with his friend Rawlins, he rides away. Soon enough, they acquire a hapless younger companion and jobs breaking horses on a hacienda. Within months, one of the boys is dead and childhood has passed for the other two, along with an era that once uniquely defined America. This is, indisputably a timeless masterpiece.

All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is also the first of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy". The book was adapted as a 2000 eponymous film, starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.