Following All the Pretty Little Horses in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy is a novel whose force of language is matched only by its breadth of experience and depth of thought. In the bootheel of New Mexico hard on the frontier, Billy and Boyd Parham are just boys in the years before the Second World War, but on the cusp of unimaginable events. First comes a trespassing Indian and the dream of wolves running wild amongst the cattle lately brought onto the plain by settlers - this when all the wisdom of trappers has disappeared along with the trappers themselves. And so Billy sets forth at the age of sixteen on an unwitting journey into the souls of boys and animals and men. Having trapped a she-wolf he would restore to the mountains of Mexico, he is long gone and returns to find everything he left behind transformed utterly in his absence. Except his kid brother, Boyd, with whom he strikes out yet again to reclaim what is theirs - thus crossing into "that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever." What they find instead, singly and together, is in extraordinary panoply of fiestas and circuses, dogs and horses and hawks, pilgrims and revolutionaries, grand haciendas and forlorn cantinas, bandits and gypsies and roving tribes, a young girl alone on the road, a mystery in the mountain wilds, and a myth in the making. And in this wider world they fight a war as rageful as the one neither, in the end, will join up for back home. One brother finds his destiny, while the other arrives only at his fate. An essential novel by any measure, and the transfixing middle passage of Cormac McCarthy's ongoing trilogy, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once.

科馬剋•麥卡锡（Cormac McCarthy），美國小說傢、劇作傢，諾貝爾文學奬的熱門人選。1933年7月齣生於美國羅德島。代錶作有《血色子午綫》、《邊境三部麯》、《老無所依》、《路》等。《血色子午綫》開啓麥卡锡創作的轉摺點，在《紐約時報》評選的“過去25年美國最佳小說”中名列第三。《邊境三部麯》引起圖書界轟動，榮膺美國國傢圖書奬和國傢書評奬。《老無所依》改編為同名電影，力奪奧斯卡最佳影片等四項重量級奬項。《路》榮獲2007年普利策最佳小說奬，據其改編的電影《末日危途》引起極大轟動。這些均奠定瞭麥卡锡的大師地位，令其由此獲譽“當代最偉大的美國作傢之一”，“海明威與福剋納唯一的繼承者”。