The Crossing

This second volume of Cormac McCarthy's famed Border Trilogy is set in the 1940s and tells the story of 16-year-old Billy Parham and his obsessive quest to return to Mexico a pregnant she-wolf he has trapped. He leaves New Mexico, setting off on his own, and in the course of this perilous (and doomed) journey he becomes far older than his years. When Billy returns, he encounters a scene of violence and desolation: everything he left behind has been transformed. He strikes out again, this time with his younger brother, Boyd, into the unknown frontier. Boyd becomes a legendary folk hero, then disappears, and Billy's new quest is to find his lost brother. McCarthy has been compared to everyone from Hemingway to Faulkner. This fable-like tale of mythic quests and heroic despair takes on the issues of guilt and innocence, love and violence, and the power of fraternal bonds.