Border Trilogy: 3 (Border Trilogy, #3)

by Cormac McCarthy

VOLUME THREE OF THE BORDER TRILOGY

In Cities of the Plain, two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together, between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to confront a country changing beyond recognition.

In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north by the military. On the southern horizon are the mountains of Mexico, where one of the men is drawn again and again, in this story of friendships and passion, to a love as dangerous as it is inevitable.

`In a lovely and terrible landscape of natural beauty and impending loss we find John Grady; a young cowboy of the old school, trusted by men and horses, and a fragile young woman, whose salvation becomes his obsession . . . McCarthy makes the sweeping plains a miracle' Scotsman

`This haunting, deeply felt novel completes one of the literary masterworks of the 1990s' Daily Telegraph

`The completed trilogy emerges as a landmark in American literature' Guardian

• ISBN10: 033034448X
• ISBN13: 9780330344487
• Publish Date: 19 June 1998 (first published 1 January 1998)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 9 April 1999
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Imprint: Picador
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 304
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Like finding yourself back in the arms of old friends. It’s why I saved the book for so long, because I knew it was going to be so good to savor: my two favorite McCarthy characters, Billy Parham and John Grady Cole, together at last. Too good to be true. It never goes huge in scope. It stays small, which is perfect. And the epilogue veers a little unnecessarily, but who could care less? I’d sit and listen to John Grady and Billy talk all day long, and that’s what the rest of the book is.

(It also makes me sad, that William Gay passed without pairing up Nathan Winer and Fleming Bloodworth. Oh, what a book that would be too.)