The Road
ABOUT
THE BOOK
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Best book in English 2006, best book so far by Cormac Mc Carthy.
This novel is very important. The spare quality of the structure and style matches the subject matter. However it is the focus on the central relationship with gives the reader huge hope for humanity.
Cormac Mc Carthy has produced a powerful vision of the future in this book, This is a disturbing, bleak yet compelling story. A dark masterpiece.
Grim. Spare. Stark. Frightening. Beautiful. One of the most powerful novels of our time, The Road is both indictment of and testament to our humanity.
In The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s sparse verbiage and rationed discourse perfectly emulate the emaciated environment and society left after Armageddon. Alternately evoking hope and despair, his depiction of both a world that has lost its way, and a father and son who are trying to find their way, will be hard to forget by anyone who reads this novel.
Our committee chose this above all other titles considered as a title of high literary merit.
With phrasing both haunting and precise, this post-apocalyptic novel manages to be bleak, horrifying, and uplifting all at the same time.
In stark, horrifying prose, McCarthy sends his nameless father and son on a journey for survival in an immediately post-apocalyptic United States. Stunning and moving.
Beautifully written book concerning a father and son trying to survive in a devastated land, his language is perfect.
This beautifully written account of a father and sons love for each other in the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon represents hope for humanity
An epic tale by a master storyteller, a very moving story.