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Cities of the Plain

Border Trilogy, Book 3

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Cities of the Plain

By: Cormac McCarthy
Narrated by: Frank Muller
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About this listen

Two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together to confront a country changing beyond recognition.

In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch, encroached upon from the north by the military. On the southern horizon are the mountains of Mexico, where one of the men is drawn incessantly in this story of friendships and passion to a love as dangerous as it is inevitable.

©1998 Cormac McCarthy (P)1998 Recorded Books Inc Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Small Town & Rural Latin America

Critic Reviews

"This haunting deeply felt novel completes one of the literary masterworks of the 1990s." ( Daily Telegraph)
"McCarthy makes the sweeping plains a miracle." ( Scotsman)
"Like the Western settings he captures to perfection, his work is both heart-wrenchingly beautiful and uncompromisingly brutal." ( The Express)
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Yet again Cormac McCarthy weaves a beautiful narrative from the simple lives of these characters. "Cities of the Plain" unites the two central protagonists of "All the Pretty Horses" and "The Crossing" and tells a story of sympathy and pathos which resonates and stays with the reader. You will fall in love with Billy and John. It is saddening to leave them here. But their profound impact will remain for some time.

A timeless classic

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Some of the writing in the trilogy (of which this is the last book) was so powerful it actually made me cry, which is something that I can't recall happening before with any novel. At times you are right there in the landscape.

I can tell I'm really shallow though, because what did leave me cold were the very long philosophical or allegorical speeches delivered by various Mexicans that pop up from time to time. Those teenage heroes of the books exhibited much more patience than grey haired me!

Wonderful, but spare me the soliloquies

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Incredible trilogy. This will be one I come back to often, i can tell. Perhaps I’ll understand more of the Spanish then but you can extrapolate most of it when it does occurs.

Incredible

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The epilogue was quite dislocated from the story for me.. though I will read it again to try and make better sense of it.

I liked the idea of the 2 main characters returning and interacting but I expected more from that and ultimately I preferred them each in their own stories volumes 1 and 2 of the Border trilogy.

The naivety of young men with first love

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I was hoping for the violence promised that would come near to equaling Blood Meridian, but it wasn’t even close☹️

A classic but I didn’t love it.

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