All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy)

Two cassettes, 3 hours
Read by Brad Pitt

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Matt Damon, directed by Billy Bob Thorton and produced by Mike Nichols!


A critical triumph, this is the story of John Grady Cole, who at 16 finds himself at the dying end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself.  To escape a society moving in all the wrong directions, Cole and two companions decide to seek their future in Mexico, a land at once beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized.  But what begins as an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, leads, in fact, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.  Within months, one of the boys is dead, and the other two aged beyond their years.

A story about childhood passing, innocence and an American age, here is a grand story and an education in responsibility, revenge, and survival.  All the Pretty Horses is truly a masterpiece.

Part bildungsroman, part horse opera, part meditation on courage and loyalty, this beautifully crafted novel won the National Book Award in 1992. The plot is simple enough. John Grady Cole, a 16-year-old dispossessed Texan, crosses the Rio Grande into Mexico in 1949, accompanied by his pal Lacey Rawlins. The two precocious horsemen pick up a sidekick--a laughable but deadly marksman named Jimmy Blevins--encounter various adventures on their way south and finally arrive at a paradisiacal hacienda where Cole falls into an ill-fated romance. Readers familiar with McCarthy's Faulknerian prose will find the writing more restrained than in Suttree and Blood Meridian. Newcomers will be mesmerized by the tragic tale of John Grady Cole's coming of age.