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Cities
of the Plain
A Novel
by Cormac McCarthy
- Synopsis
In this final volume of The Border Trilogy, two men
marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses
and The Crossing now stand together, in the still point
between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to
confront a country changing or already changed beyond
recognition. In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and
Billy Parham--nine years apart in age, yet with a kinship
greater than perhaps they know--are cowboys on a New
Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north, at
Alamogordo, by the military. To the south, always on the
horizon are the mountains of Mexico, looming over El
Paso, Ciudad Juarez and all the cities of the plain.
Bound by nature to horses and cattle and range, these two
discover that ranchlife domesticity is compromised, for
them and the men they work with, by a geometry of loss
afflicting old and young alike, those who have survived
it and anyone about to try. And what draws one of them
across the border again and again, what would bind
"those disparate but fragile worlds," is a girl
seized by ill fortune, and a love as dangerous as it is
inevitable.
This story of friendship and passion is enfolded in a
narrative replete with character and place and event--a
blind musician, a marauding pack of dogs, curio shops and
ancient petroglyphs, a precocious shoe-shine boy, trail
drives from the century before, midnight on the
highway--and with landforms and wildlife and horses and
men, most of all men and the women they love and mourn,
men and their persistence and memories and dreams. With
the terrible beauty of Cities of the Plain--with its
magisterial prose, humor both wry and out-right, fierce
conviction and unwavering humanity--Cormac McCarthy has
completed a landmark of our literature and times, an epic
that reaches from tales of the old west, the world past,
into the new millennium, the world to come.
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