About the Author

Cormac McCarthy is the author of ten acclaimed novels, most recently The Road. Among his honours are the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Reviews

A darkly shining work . . . executed with consummate skill and much subtlety - the effect is magnificent
*Observer*

An exhilarating, exceptional novel
*Spectator*

In a single stride it takes McCarthy to the forefront of contemporary American fiction. All the Pretty Horses is indisputably a masterpiece.
*Financial Times*

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. It is a simple story (the first in a trilogy) of three Texas youths whose flight to Mexico on horseback in 1949 traverses far more than geographical borders, marking a descent into the deeper forces of friendship, love, and cruelty. Its style owes an enormous debt to Hemingway, but it pays that debt with interest. That its laconic hero, John Grady Cole, proves resourceful beyond his years (and almost beyond belief) places the novel in the tradition of classic Westerns, but never has any Western been so well told. The novel's moral logic and McCarthy's mystique of ``blood'' are questionable, but there is poignancy in Cole's yearning to touch something in horses that has passed from the race of men, to find a depth of wisdom that can only come with age, and, like most of McCarthy's people, to escape what is deadly in modern American life. The unabridged version is one of the best recorded books to date, for Frank Muller's narration is such a perfect model of balance and control that it deserves an award in itself. In the Random House abridgment, film actor Brad Pitt simply doesn't compare. With a superb complete version on the market, there is no reason to settle for anything less.-- Peter Josyph, New York

A darkly shining work . . . executed with consummate skill and much subtlety - the effect is magnificent -- John Banville * Observer *
An exhilarating, exceptional novel * Spectator *
In a single stride it takes McCarthy to the forefront of contemporary American fiction. All the Pretty Horses is indisputably a masterpiece. * Financial Times *