Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, New York, Knopf, 1992. 8 ¾ x 6. First edition, first printing. Black cloth spine, black paper over boards, gilt titles. Two issue points present – FPT to jacket $21.00 and date 5/92 to rear flap. First volume of the Border Trilogy, and Winner of the National Book Award.

Cormac McCarthy had written five previous novels, the most recent Blood Meridian (based on a true story about the Old West) yet was relevantly unknown until this book. 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.

Now regarded as a classic of American fiction it is a work that relates to crime fiction. The ferocious prose, the obligatory introduction to “young love”, this passage to adulthood includes exile in a foreign country, being hunted on horseback across a barren desert, variously stabbed, shot, tortured, or imprisoned. John Grady Cole is a sixteen year-old son of a Texas rancher who, up until his grandfather’s death, worked the ranch and developed an uncommon kinship with horses. With his grandfather gone, his father dying, and his mother flitting around … John Grady sets out on horseback for Mexico with buddy Lacey Rawlings. What follows is an odyssey of restless youth across a rugged country, a tough landscape with tough characters, a bloody journey that is not without the humour and easy banter of young teenagers on their own.

Condition: Fine except for neat name (Nora Taylor) to front free endpaper, o/w nice, clean and tight collectible copy in fine jacket.