<P>Cormac McCarthy is a quiet unassuming presence in American fiction today but like the slow measured voices of many of his characters he speaks with an authority and conviction that demands an audience. All the Pretty Horses McCarthy's sixth novel is a cowboy odyssey for modern times. Set in the late 1940s it features the travels and toils of a 16-year-old East Texan named John Grady Cole caught in the agonizing purgatory between adolescence and adulthood.</P><P>At the start of the novel Cole's grandfather has just died his parents have permanently separated and the family ranch upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive Cole leaves Texas accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico. In spite of its hard realities and spare telling <I>All the Pretty Horses</I> is a lyrical and richly romantic story chronicling—along with the erosion of the frontier—the loss of an era.</P>