All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses is a novel by the American writer Cormac McCarthy, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. It was his sixth published novel and his first bestseller.

John Grady Cole is the young man at the centre of it. He rides south into Mexico looking for the kind of life that is no longer available to him at home, and he finds work breaking horses at a ranch there.

While he is at the ranch he falls in love with Alejandra, the owner's daughter, and the two of them begin something that the people around them will not allow to continue quietly. The novel follows what happens to him as a result.

The book sold a hundred and ninety thousand copies in hardcover in its first six months, where none of his earlier novels had sold more than five thousand, and it won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is the first of the three novels of the Border Trilogy and was adapted into a film in 2000.