All the Pretty Horses

‘His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' – Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series

'All the Pretty Horses is indisputably a masterpiece' – Financial Times

1949. At sixteen years-old, 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.

A grand love story, Cormac McCarthy's novel is about the passing of childhood, of 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.

‘One of the greatest American novels of this or any time’ – Guardian

‘[A] totalizing reality, where meditation and resistance are two components of one reality, a destiny of wandering the borderlands of the U.S. and Mexico in the postwar twentieth century' – Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room

Adapted into a film starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz.

All the Pretty Horses is followed in the Border Trilogy by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain.

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

Praise for Cormac McCarthy:

‘McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute’ – Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren

'[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' – Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain