The border trilogy

Cormac McCarthy’s award-winning, bestselling trio of novels chronicles the coming-of-age of two young men in the south west of America. John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, two cowboys of the old school, are poised on the edge of a world about to change forever. Their journeys across the border into Mexico, each an adventure fraught with fear and pain, mark a passage into adulthood, and eventual salvation. In All the Pretty Horses, young John Grady Cole, dispossessed by the sale of his family’s Texas ranch, heads across the border in search of the cowboy life, where he finds a job breaking horses, and a dangerously ill-fated romance. In The Crossing, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a wolf that has been marauding his family’s ranch and, instead of killing it, decides to take it on a perilous journey home to the mountains of Mexico.These two drifters come together years later in Cities of the Plain, a magnificent tale of friendship and passion. In the vanishing world of the Old West, blood and violence are conditions of life. Beautiful and brutal, filled with sorrow and humour, The Border Trilogy is both an epic love story and a fierce elegy for the American frontier.