John Grady Cole is sixteen when his grandfather dies and the ranch he expected to inherit gets sold out from under him. It’s 1949, and the cowboy life he wants has already ended in Texas, so he and a friend saddle up and ride south into Mexico looking for it. They pick up a younger kid on the way, a liar with a good horse, and that decision costs everybody. They find work breaking horses on a big hacienda in Coahuila, and John Grady is so good at it that the owner takes notice, which is the trouble, because so does the owner’s daughter. What follows is prison, a knife fight, and a long ride back with nothing. McCarthy writes the horses and the country in long, unpunctuated runs of prose and the dialogue bare, much of it in Spanish, untranslated. It won the National Book Award in 1992.