Two young cowboys come of age in the dying days of the American frontier – across this award-winning trilogy, loyalty, love and the brutality of this landscape will determine the course of their lives.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. In the vanishing world of the Old West, two cowboys begin an epic adventure, and their own coming-of-age stories. In All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole’s search for a future takes him across the Mexican border to a job as a ranch hand and an ill-fated romance. The Crossing is the story of sixteen-year-old Billy Parham who sets off on a perilous journey across the mountains of Mexico, accompanied only by a lone wolf. Eventually the two come together in Cities of the Plain in a stunning tale of loyalty and love. A true classic of American literature, The Border Trilogy is Cormac McCarthy’s award-winning requiem for the American frontier. Beautiful and brutal, filled equally with sorrow and humour, it is a powerful story of two friends growing up in a world where blood and violence are conditions of life. `A landmark in American literature’ Guardian `In these three fierce, desolate, beautiful novels, McCarthy has created a masterpiece’ Sunday Times

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