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Summary and Reviews of All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

All The Pretty Horses

by Cormac McCarthy
  • Critics' Consensus (7):
  • Readers' Rating (4):
  • First Published:
  • Apr 1, 1992, 401 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Nov 2002, 301 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

The first volume in the Border Trilogy - the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, 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. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

Nominee 1992 - National Book Awards
Nominee1992 - National Book Critics Circle Awards
Winner - ALA Best Books for Young Adults
Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Matt Damon, produced by Mike Nichols, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.

The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door. He took off his hat and came slowly forward. The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub. He pressed his thumbprint in the warm wax pooled on the oak veneer. Lastly he looked at the face so caved and drawn among the folds of funeral cloth, the yellowed moustache, the eyelids paper thin. That was not sleeping. That was not sleeping.

It was dark outside and cold and no wind. In the distance a calf bawled. He stood with his hat in his hand. You never combed your hair that way in your life, he said.

Inside the house there was no sound...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
About This Book 

At once a Western, a picaresque adventure, and a coming-of-age novel, suspenseful, wryly funny, and elegiac, All the Pretty Horses is the story of John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of west Texas ranchers. Upon his grandfather's death and his parents' divorce, the sixteen-year-old Cole finds himself landless, penniless, and possessed of skills that mean nothing in a country transformed by highways and a world war, where cowboys are as doomed and marginal as the Indians they once displaced. With his friend Lacey Rawlins, John Grady sets off for Mexico. They have no idea what they will find there: on their map, the area south of the Rio Grande is blank. They have between them two horses, a rifle, and ...
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Reviews

Media Reviews

Boston Globe
McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame. [His] work itself repays the tight focus of his attention with its finely wrought craftsmanship and its ferocious energy.

Esquire
. . .[A] grand love story, an education in responsibility.

New York Times Book Review
McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame. [His] work itself repays the tight focus of his attention with its finely wrought craftsmanship and its ferocious energy.

Library Journal
Before this beautifully written novel, McCarthy's sixth and most accessible, won last year's National Book Award and became a best seller, its author was one of the least known of great American novelists.

Newsweek
Rambunctious, high-spirited...All the Pretty Horses is a true American original.

Publishers Weekly
This is a novel so exuberant in its prose, so offbeat in its setting and so mordant and profound in its deliberations that one searches in vain for comparisons in American literature....Though some readers may grow impatient with the wild prairie rhythms of McCarthy's language, others will find his voice completely transporting.

Kirkus Reviews
Like the late D.H. Lawrence at his worst and most pretentious, all blood-voodoo and animistic design, McCarthy makes an awfully unconvincing lot of a little here.

Reader Reviews

J F Freedman

all the pretty horses
The greatest American novel of the last 40 years. Homeric in scope, style, and feeling. Too bad McCarthy died before he could win the Nobel Prize.
Pete Lester

All The Pretty Horses
One of the best books you will read. Five Stars. Great film as well. Conrad McCormick.
Katherine

One of my favorite books ever!
This book, and the other two in the Border Trilogy, captured my heart from the beginning. McCarthy does a fabulous job with character development, so you feel like you really know the main character and understand how he thinks as he comes of age. To...   Read More
Suzanne G.

So good . . .
This book is the first in a trilogy. I wondered at first if I was reading the book with such wonderful reviews or was it a “same title” book. Thank goodness, after taking more time with my reading, slowing down and even rereading the Spanish dialogue...   Read More

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