Cormac McCarthy, winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, returns with his 10th novel, a terrifying "what if" story about the apocalypse. A father and his son travel the road in search of food, safety and humanity after a nuclear war has wiped out society and most of the human race.

At once a Western, a picaresque adventure, and a coming-of-age novel, suspenseful, wryly funny, and elegiac, All the Pretty Horses is the story of John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of west Texas ranchers. Upon his grandfather's death and his parents' divorce, the sixteen-year-old Cole finds himself landless, penniless, and possessed of skills that mean nothing in a country transformed by highways and a world war, where cowboys are as doomed and marginal as the Indians they once displaced. With his friend Lacey Rawlins, John Grady sets off for Mexico. They have no idea what they will find there: on their map, the area south of the Rio Grande is blank. They have between them two horses, a rifle, and their bedrolls. The year is 1949.