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The Border Trilogy #1-3

The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain

cormac mccarthy

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Beginning with All the Pretty Horses and continuing through The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, McCarthy chronicles the lives of two young men coming of age in the Southwest and Mexico, poised on the edge of a world about to change forever. Hauntingly beautiful, filled with sorrow and humor, The Border Trilogy is a masterful elegy for the American frontier.

1020 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1998
Series
The Border Trilogy
Places
texas, mexico, new mexico, sonora, chihuahua, 

This edition

Format
1020 pages, Hardcover
Published
September 28, 1999 by Everyman's Library
ISBN
9780375407932
ASIN
0375407936
Language
English

More editions

About the author

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cormac mccarthy

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Cormac McCarthy was an American novelist and playwright. He wrote twelve novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres and also wrote plays and screenplays. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. His earlier Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time Magazine's poll of 100 best English-language books published between 1925 and 2005, and he placed joint runner-up for a similar title in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner. In 2009, Cormac McCarthy won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, a lifetime achievement award given by the PEN American Center.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
26(26%)
4 stars
37(37%)
3 stars
37(37%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
0(0%)
100 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
ZorroBaka
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Fantastic trilogy. The Crossing is the best book in the trilogy. Worth a read if you're looking for not a word out of place. Super dense, vivid imagery, many ponderings on the human condition, and violent scenes. If anyone is stalking my goodreads looking for gift ideas, I wouldn't mind a boxed set of the Border Trilogy.
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jaegermon
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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che è bello, eh. bello e poetico e con un sacco di cavalli e di polvere e di sigarette e di sfiga e di pessimismo. scritto in texano che ti ci vogliono tipo 100 pagine per capire che of=have e che moren=more than.
poi tra le righe capisci che il tempo non esiste, che il luogo è talmente immenso da sembrare minuscolo, perché per quanto ti muova rimani sempre lì. che i pensieri e le intenzioni non contano niente, ci sono solo i fatti. fatti piccoli e scomposti in gesti, un pollice sulla tesa del cappello, dilatati fino a diventare eterni. sono i piccoli gesti che fanno la storia, che raccontano le emozioni che non si possono esprimere in un mondo di così poche parole.
però cazzo, nel terzo libro non si sopporta.
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Zeroth_Xadron
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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"He knew that our enemies by contrast seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him."

"When you look at the world is there a point in time when the seen becomes the remembered? How are they separate? It is that which we have no way to show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes. And yet it is all we have."

"...and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift."
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kirito1452
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Well, I've finished it -- I read All the Pretty Horses more than a decade ago as a wide-eyed and baby-faced college freshman who thought he was going to be the next Raymond Carver, before realizing I didn't like most people enough to write about them empathetically, and as a teenager who believed in the paramount value of sincerity and authenticity in art.

So I re-read All the Pretty Horses (still loved it), before moving onto The Crossing -- which didn't quite hit me as much as I was hoping it would, except for the part with the fallen airplane at the end. Fuck me, that was a gorgeously painted scene (sidenote: my Spanish is rusty enough that I probably should have had a dictionary for most of the book). And then Cities of the Plain, which is where McCarthy's protagonists run headlong into the modern world, and it turns into a Southwestern version of Taxi Driver, with sad-eyed prostitute, nasty pimp, and a man who has difficulty confronting the world in which we find ourselves.

The whole thing was a lot to take in, and I'm not sure how I feel about reading all three as a single volume instead of spacing them out as I normally would. But hey, it's McCarthy, so can't really go wrong.
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anonymoustien
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Nachtrag. Meisterwerke, möchte 2025 zumindest diese drei Werke von McCarthy erneut lesen.
Hoffentlich schaffe ich es (zeitlich).
Jetzt habe ich es mir hier ja versprochen
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Inukanura
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I had a hard time with this, very stark writing, slow, he makes his point but I wish he could have done it in a shorter version. I had no involvement with the stories or the characters, mostly finished it because I was told he was a magnificent author.
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10dice
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Very much enjoyed the trilogy as a whole. I went into it blind in terms of story, leaving me to believe after the second book that the three books together were linked in theme only. That was surprisingly, and enjoyably, false. A few thoughts on each book:

In All the Pretty Horses, the first novel of the trilogy, McCarthy laments the passage of time, the ways that life pulls the earth from under us. The novel concerns 16-year old John Grady Cole, and as he passes into adulthood, we mourn with him the passing of simpler times, the fencing in of boundless hope, and the dousing of those first, pure flickers of love. McCarthy's almost musical descriptions of the hard landscape set an appropriate tone for the unforgiving world that awaits Cole, and yet the main character remains steadfast despite it all. Compelling stuff.

The Crossing is a heartbreaking dirge for the old west, a rumination on true brotherhood, and an illustration of the power of myth to unite and even create communities across space and time. That said, the myth of the west is clearly in decline as the modern world--symbolized through the overwhelming influence of WWII in the US--leaves people searching for the power and personality of myth in the midst of an impersonal machine-world.

Cities of the Plain brings the two primary characters from the first two novels together in a story that once again highlights what appears to be an eternal disjunction between the US and Mexico. For the resident of one country to seek his fortunes in the other leads only to pain, heartache, and loss. McCarthy concludes the novel with a searching epilogue that's laced with hope--or at least some measure of solace or comfort. It yields a cathartic ending to this perceptive and beautifully written trilogy.

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