The Border Trilogy

The Border Trilogy consists of three novels written by American author Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998).

Although originally published as three separate novels, the books taken as whole have an architecture that sets the trilogy apart from the individual volumes. The romanticism explored in All the Pretty Horses, all but completely negated by the end of the novel, is even further desolated by the end of the trilogy. The despair and despolation evident in Cities of the Plain takes on considerably more weight when read at the cumulative end of the series, and the losses that pervade The Crossing are heightened by the greater loss of an entire way of life rendered in the final novel.