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Publisher's Summary

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
Literary Fiction Small Town & Rural Historical Fiction
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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.” ( The Scotsman)
"Like the Western settings he captures to perfection, his work is both heart-wrenchingly beautiful and uncompromisingly brutal." ( Express)

What listeners say about Cities of the Plain

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Profile Image for Tzvi David Szajnbrum

not a big hit but the performance is outstanding.

Maybe it is my fault but the story is too much of not matching...it should be not so much philosophical

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  • Paul D
  • 02-03-17

D r a w l i n g tale of a vanishing world

I enjoy the writing of Cormac McCarthy and this book is no exception. Slow and thoughtful it drifts along with minimal plot more a reflection of a era than a novel. Interesting characters and well drawn scenes. Perhaps an hour too long, what little story there is has finished and we are then given a little too much philosophy. The whole book presents a philosophy but this is presented for us to discover in the lives of the characters, at the end it is presented almost a a lecture given by one character to another. Sorry rather a yawn at times.

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  • Evie
  • 12-15-18

Distracting voice acting

A great book, just a shame about the voice acting, which I found overdone and distracted from the sparse prose of McCarthy. The raspy/gravelly quality of the actor’s voice seemed put on. It would be great if there was some continuity in the voice acting between The Crossing (which I thought was excellent).
Otherwise an enjoyable finish to the Border Trilogy.

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  • randy dingo
  • 06-07-18

Missed the narrator from the previous book.

The narrator's take on Billy turned him into a different character compared to The Crossing.