All the Pretty Horses Add a review

All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. His sixth published novel, it was his first bestseller, selling 190,000 hardcover in its first six months of publication where none of his first five novels had sold more than 5,000. It won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

It tells the story of John Grady Cole, who gets a job breaking horses at a ranch in Mexico and falls in love with the owner's daughter, Alejandra. It's the first novel in McCarthy's Border Trilogy. It was followed by The Crossing, about a different protagonist travelling across the U.S.–Mexico borderlands; and Cities of the Plain, the story of both protagonists in their adulthood.

It was later adapted into a 2000 film directed by Billy Bob Thornton, starring Matt Damon as John Grady and Penélope Cruz as Alejandra.