Though some readers may grow impatient with the wild prairie rhythms of McCarthy's language, others will find his voice completely transporting. In McCarthy's unblinking imagination the boys suffer truly harrowing encounters with corrupt Mexican officials, enigmatic bandits and a desert weather that roils like an angry god. These likable boys affect the cowboy's taciturnity-they roll cigarettes and say what they mean-and yet amongst themselves are given to terse, comic exchanges about life and death. Although the year is 1948, the landscape-at some moments parched and unforgiving, at others verdant and gentled by rain-seems out of time, somewhere before history or after it. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride their horses south into Mexico they are joined by another boy, the mysterious Jimmy Blevins, a 14-year-old sharpshooter. With his parents already split up and his mother working in theater out of town, there is no longer reason for him to stay. John Grady Cole is a 16-year-old boy who leaves his Texas home when his grandfather dies. None of McCarthy's previous works, not even the award-winning The Orchard Keeper (1965) or the much-admired Blood Meridian (1985), quite prepares the reader for the singular achievement of this first installment in the projected Border Trilogy. This is a novel so exuberant in its prose, so offbeat in its setting and so mordant and profound in its deliberations that one searches in vain for comparisons in American literature.

Author of all the pretty horses