The first in a trilogy, All The Pretty Horses tells the story of two teenage friends from Texas who run away to Mexico, one of whom falls in love with an unattainable woman, the daughter of a powerful hacendado.
I read this while in Spain, and yet the lengthy untranslated paragraphs of Spanish in the book made me miss home, as Mexican Spanish is the language that is to me the most reminiscent of California. The story itself is inextricably intertwined with its setting: the US-Mexico border region—and more specifically, Central Texas and Coahuila in the mid-20th century. I gleaned a vivid sense of a time long gone and a place I had never been to from this book. While critics tend to favor The Crossing, the second book in the trilogy, I personally found All the Pretty Horses to be a more evocative and less depressing read.