The Road
Pulitzer Prize Winner
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4.3 • 3.2K Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The Road portrays a bleak, haunted world where people have become the worst versions of themselves. In all honesty it's one of the darkest books we've ever read, but it made us look at ourselves with fresh eyes. A nameless father is determined to deliver his young son to safety in a land so post-apocalyptic that even the apocalypse itself is barely remembered. The extremely talented Cormac McCarthy is by no means a nihilist: a spark of stubborn hope powers this odyssey even at its grimmest points.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Violence, in McCarthy's postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. (The man's wife, who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. Beyond the ever-present possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic thugs. The man assures the boy that the two of them are "good guys," but from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out. 250,000 announced first printing; BOMC main selection.
Customer Reviews
Illuminating
A fascinating interpretation of human survival and priorities.
A haunting masterpiece... It will remain with you long after you are finished reading it
This is one of the few books that i can safely say I felt changed by the end of it. I was not the same person I was when I first picked it up. This masterwork hangs over the soul like a specter, haunting and harrowing the heart in ways very rarely paralleled. This seemingly simple story of a father and son trying to survive in a dying world turns out to be a deep, provocative journey into the deepest reaches of the soul, one that the world must never forget. Here is a masterpiece whose power can bring men to their knees.
Depressing
While the writer created a beautiful relationship between a father and son, that was all. It was very sad and depressing. The story really dragged as well.