The Crossing

Between 1940 and 1944, teenage Billy Parham leaves his family’s New Mexico ranch after capturing a she-wolf that has crossed north from Mexico. Rather than kill it, he attempts to return the animal to the mountains, beginning the first of several journeys across a border marked by poverty, revolutionary memory and sudden violence. Later crossings with his younger brother Boyd turn the quest into a search for family, justice and some intelligible order in a landscape that repeatedly refuses all three.

The novel takes place earlier than All the Pretty Horses and provides the chronological beginning of the Border Trilogy. Its episodic encounters with refugees, religious thinkers, survivors of the Mexican Revolution and people displaced by war make Billy’s passage a prolonged education in grief, hospitality and moral uncertainty, while the approach of the Second World War closes around a frontier world that already seems ancient.