Border Trilogy (McCarthy)

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. 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, All the Pretty Horses is a lyrical and richly romantic story, chronicling-along with the erosion of the frontier-the loss of an era.

In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth. In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning--a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there." An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once.

In his novels, best-selling author Cormac McCarthy creates a western landscape filled with characters that are both myhic and authentic. Cities of the Plain, the stunning conclusion of his award-winning Border trilogy, brings together John Grady Cole and Billy Parham-the two lifelong friends who began their adventures in All the Pretty Horses. It is 1952. As Grady and Billy work a remote New Mexico ranch, Grady falls in love with a young Mexican prostitute. Determined to free her from her owner, Grady embarks on his dangerous quest of the heart. Billy tries to protect and help him, but the forces at work soon demand sacrifices greater than either can control. Capturing visions of the American West during its last decades, McCarthy's powerful work is destined to leave a permanent mark on contemporary literature. You don't have to read the other books in the trilogy to enjoy superstar narrator Frank Muller's performance, which brings a dramatic intensity to Cities of the Plain and makes it an exceptional listening experience.