The Border Trilogy: Picador Classic

Beautiful and brutal, two young cowboys come of age in The Border Trilogy – Cormac McCarthy's award-winning requiem for the American frontier.

'A landmark in American literature' – Guardian

With an introduction from Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room.

During the middle of the twentieth century, two teenage boys leave their childhoods behind across the US-Mexico border.

John Grady Cole will search for his future to the south, a friend by his side, finding adventure and barbarism in the vanishing world of the Old West.

Billy Parnham, after deciding not to kill her, will be drawn to the mountains of Mexico accompanied by a lone, pregnant wolf.

When the two boys come together as men, in the trilogy's final volume, a dangerous chain of events will bring this story to its savage, inevitable conclusion.

A stunning saga of loyalty and love, filled equally with sorrow and humour, The Border Trilogy is a powerful story of two friends growing up in a world where blood and violence are conditions of life.

'In these three fierce, desolate, beautiful novels, McCarthy has created a masterpiece' – Sunday Times

This edition collects all three novels in the Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain.

Praise for Cormac McCarthy

‘McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute’ – Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren

'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' – Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series

'[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' – Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain