The Road
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4.4 • 2.3K Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
The searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive.
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.
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year
The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington Post
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
Great writing
Beautiful minimalist writing. I love the lyrical attributes and rhythm you feel while reading The Road. I drew a lot of inspiration from McCarthy in my own writing
Excellent
Likely outcome eventually
GCBSF: Good Cataclysm. Baby-Sitting Father!
Dear Cormac – Wow. The writing in this is very good. I worry about you. Because if this story was inside of you, it must be pretty dark in there. How are you? We loved the babysitting in this scintillating novel – I particularly loved the scene where the man taught the boy to shoot a flair gun. This novel and the Ann M. Martin classic “BSC in the USA” speak to each other across the void. Both are about road trips, babysitting, and flawed father figures. Cormac - Quick question: Is this our actual future? By which we mean, is the heat death of the universe going to kill everyone we’ve known (and the humanity and warmth inside us) and snuff out every light we’ve ever turned our faces to in hope as the universe succumbs to entropy and everything descends into darkness?
And finally, was it jorts when they find the pants and cut them?
– Jack Shepherd and Tanner Greenring (P.S. We loved this one)