All the Pretty Horses

In 1949, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole, a Texas rancher's son who has lost the family ranch, rides into Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins in search of work as a cowboy. They fall in with a runaway boy, Jimmy Blevins, whose stolen horse brings trouble.

Cole finds work on a Coahuila hacienda and falls in love with the owner's daughter, a romance that costs him dearly, and the young men end up in a brutal Mexican prison. The first volume of the Border Trilogy won the 1992 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.