In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham - nine years apart in age, yet with a kinship greater than perhaps they know - are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north, at Almogordo, by the military. To the south, always on the horizon, are the mountains of Mexico, looming over El Paso, Ciudad Juarez and all the cities of the plain.
Bound by nature to horses and cattle and range, these two discover that ranchlife domesticity is compromised, for them and the men they work with, by a geometry of loss afflicting old and young alike, those who have survived it and anyoner about to try. And what draws one of them across the border again and again, what would blind 'those disparate but fragile worlds', is a girl seized by ill fortune, and a love as dangerous as it is inevitable.
