WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son’s fight to survive that “only adds to McCarthy’s stature as a living master. It’s gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful” (San Francisco Chronicle).
One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
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.
I kept thinking the whole way through how McCarthy wrote this for his son John, and God, what a love letter for the kid to have the rest of his life.
The fifth star for the rhythm of the book, just like a metronome.
[Edited to clarify: I wasn’t being sarcastic or ironic about the love letter. I mean it. Apparently this book gets read as grim or depressing, but I think it’s the most heart-and-guts love letter a kid could get from his father.]
Reading updates
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Started reading
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6 April, 2010:
Finished reading
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6 April, 2010:
Reviewed