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. The first volume in McCarthy’s legendary Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about childhood passing, along with 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. This edition is part of the Picador Collection, a new list of the best in contemporary literature published in Picador’s 50th Anniversary year. McCarthy’s eagerly anticipated new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, will be published by Picador in October 2022.

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