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All the Pretty Horses: Border Trilogy 1 (National Book Award Winner) (The Border Trilogy)
Contemporary, Genre Fiction, Westerns
All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
- Release Date
- 1992
- Length
- 302 pages
- Publisher
- Alfred A. Knopf
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Our Review
About the book
The first volume of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, published in 1992, follows sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole, who leaves his family’s Texas ranch in 1949 and rides into Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Their journey toward a vanishing way of life brings them work on a hacienda, a forbidden romance and serious danger.
Our review
McCarthy’s most romantic novel is a gorgeous, aching elegy for the cowboy life, and the perfect gateway to his work.
This is McCarthy at his most accessible and arguably his most beautiful. The story of two young riders crossing into Mexico has the bones of a classic Western, but the prose turns landscapes, horses and long silences into something close to poetry. John Grady Cole is one of his most memorable characters, stubborn and principled in a world that has little room for either. The book won the National Book Award, and it earns it.
The style will not suit everyone. McCarthy famously skips quotation marks, uses long run-on sentences and includes extended passages of untranslated Spanish, which can be disorienting at first. The pace is deliberate, and the violence, when it comes, is stark. For readers willing to settle into its rhythm, it is a deeply moving novel about youth, loss and the end of an era.
What we loved
- Breathtaking, lyrical prose
- A compelling, idealistic young hero
- A more approachable entry into McCarthy’s work
Keep in mind
- Unconventional punctuation and untranslated Spanish
- Slow pacing and moments of harsh violence
Read it if you like
fans of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, readers of No Country for Old Men, lovers of literary Westerns
The verdict
A lyrical, heartbreaking modern Western and our top recommendation for anyone starting with Cormac McCarthy.
