Recommendations
Books Like All the Pretty Horses
Best books to read after All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses is McCarthy at his most accessible and most romantic — John Grady Cole's coming-of-age in Mexico, his love for Alejandra, and the violence that ends it. If the novel's prose beauty and its portrait of a young man's encounter with the adult world of violence and loss moved you, these books share its West Texas landscape, its concern with the end of a way of life, and its conviction that beauty and violence are inseparable.
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The Crossing
by Cormac McCarthy
The second volume of the Border Trilogy — Billy Parham's multiple crossings into Mexico, organized around a captured wolf; more elegiac and less conventionally plotted than All the Pretty Horses, but the essential continuation for readers who want to stay in McCarthy's world after the first volume
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No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's thriller about the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong and the unstoppable Anton Chigurh — the most immediately readable and widely known of his later novels; shares All the Pretty Horses's Texas landscape and its sense that the West has become a place where the old codes no longer apply
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The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic novel — the most emotionally accessible of his books and the one that most directly continues the father-son concern that All the Pretty Horses introduces; the tenderness between John Grady and his father's memory is given its fullest expression in The Road's portrait of a father carrying his son through a dead world
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Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the last great cattle drive from Texas to Montana is the most celebrated contemporary Western and the closest parallel to All the Pretty Horses in its concern with the end of the American West as a way of life and its portrait of old men and young men navigating a world that is changing faster than they can adapt
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True Grit
by Charles Portis
Portis's novel about the fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross who hires a drunken US Marshal to track down her father's killer — the most formally original Western and the one that most clearly demonstrates the genre's capacity for moral complexity; shares All the Pretty Horses's portrait of a young person whose moral code is tested by the violence of the West
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The Border Trilogy
by Cormac McCarthy
All three Border Trilogy novels read together — All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), Cities of the Plain (1998) — give the fullest picture of McCarthy's vision of the American Southwest and his portrait of the end of a particular way of life in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's most extreme and most ambitious novel — violence on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1840s, organized around the Judge, one of the most terrifying characters in American fiction; the landscape of All the Pretty Horses but a century earlier and a hundred times more violent; only for readers who want to pursue McCarthy to his furthest reaches
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Legends of the Fall
by Jim Harrison
Harrison's novella trilogy — especially the title novella about the Ludlow brothers in Montana — is the most direct American parallel to All the Pretty Horses in its portrait of beautiful young men destroyed by the forces of history, war, and the violence inherent in the landscape they inhabit; lyrical, violent, and deeply romantic
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