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On the surface, this book is a cowboy adventure. A gritty story in which childhood doesn't exist and two teenage boys, John Grady and Lacey Rawlins, are alone riding in a land foreign to them. They speak when they only truly have something worth saying. They sleep under the stars. Their only possessions are often the clothes on their back, a razor and a toothbrush. Oh, and their horses.

This life is sometimes idyllic, but more often, dangerous. It becomes complicated when they run into Blevins, a kid whose fate entwines with theirs, with disastrous consequences.

As in other books by this author, themes of fate and inevitability echo. Several lines have a prescient quality to happenings later on in the book. And, similar to No Country for Old Men, the wheels of the story are pushed down the hill by one single decision. It's pretty brutal (cauterizing a bullet wound using a heated gun barrel is just one of the cringe-inducing scenes), though truth be told, this is decidedly gentler than other McCarthy books.

So yes, wild west saga. But between the lines, the book couldn't be more romantic. Not Nora Roberts romantic, no, although there is a love story here too. But within this book pulses a heart that beats passionately for the past. This heart is broken for the loss of a time that no longer exists. The ticking clock has left John Grady in a country he doesn't recognise, and to which he no longer belongs.

Set in 1949, he is witnessing is the death of an era. People will watch movies about cowboys, instead of living like them. Elvis and television, office jobs and jello-molded salads - an artificially sanitised culture is around the bend. We don't glimpse the new world in the pages of this book, but we readers know what is ahead, and we know this guy on his horse will be the square peg, a ghostrider, a bewildered and bewildering sight.

This yearning nostalgia is reflected in unbelievably lyrical prose. McCarthy outdoes himself here in lush descriptions that convey a deep romance, while at the same point writing with zero sentimentality. It's a magical mixture of the bleak and the heartfelt.

This novel isn't perfect. The ending, just as in No Country, slows significantly from a galloping story to a series of rambling speeches. But, I just couldn't give it less than five stars. I guess I like romance more than I thought.

At the end of the day, there are few things John Grady can count on. One is his profound solitude. The other: those horses, those pretty horses - time cannot touch them.