Product Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER
National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist

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

The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.

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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-28
• Released on: 2007-03-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 287 pages

Amazon.com
Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham

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Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane

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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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.(Oct.)
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From The New Yorker
In his new novel, McCarthy exchanges the bleak Western setting of previous works for an even bleaker post-apocalyptic one. As usual, lawless space engenders violence, but here a nuclear holocaust has reduced everything to ash, mummifying all but a few unlucky souls, who must kill or be killed (and eaten). The main characters are a father and his son, who was born a few nights after the bombs fell. "We're still the good guys," the man repeatedly assures the boy as they scavenge their way south for the winter, trying to avoid "bad guy" survival techniques. Even by McCarthy's standards, the horrors here—an infant "headless and gutted and blackening on the spit"—are extreme, and, deprived of historical context, his brutality can seem willful. But McCarthy's prose retains its ability to seduce—the deathscape is "like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world"—and there are nods to the gentler aspects of the human spirit.
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Customer Reviews

A Dreary Road Weaving Through a Bleak Future
I finally got around to reading what is already acknowledged as a modern day masterpiece and I found it to be lyrically beautiful and profoundly disturbing at the same time. "The Road" is Cormac McCarthy's haunting vision of a post-apocalyptic world where values are confused, goodness is debatable, and love remains the central value worth living for.

McCarthy's beautifully spare prose is captivating in its simplicity yet his words haunt the reader long after putting the book down. Readers who value structure in a novel will be uncomfortable with "The Road" because it is written in a free flow stream of consciousness style that just begins on the road to the sea and ends on the road by the sea. The two main characters are unnamed and referred to only as the man and the boy. Questions about what happened to cause the apocalypse, who the man is (was), why are they going where they are going arise throughout but are seldom, if ever, answered. The answers are --it doesn't matter--but that may be too nebulous for some readers. Our job as readers is to get on board with the father/son journey on "The Road" and experience life and death, good and evil through their eyes.

Simply summarized, a father and his son (maybe 9 or 10 years old) are following a road toward the sea. The world as we know it is gone through some apocalyptic event and the world they face is grim and dreary covered in a post nuclear winter where gray ash covers all, no life is left in the sky or the seas, and those who continue to struggle for survival seem split into those of some goodness who mainly hide from those who have embraced evil as marauders and even cannibals.

"The Road" is a study in contrasts...the contrast of good versus evil, but also the contrast between what we say we are and what our actions say we really are. It is a study of the perseverance of faith and love and how that reflects one's goodness and continuing spirit. We are left to ask ourselves, would we have the inner spirit to do what the man does out of love for his child while inwardly coming to believe the journey is doomed for one or both of them? And if we felt we were ultimately doomed, what would our responsibility be to our young child who would be left alone in this devastated world?

READ THIS BOOK
This is a hard book for me to describe. It is the first novel that I have ever read by Cormac McCarthy and, perhaps, will be the only one I ever read. The Road is by turns hopeful, bleak, devestating, horrifying and... Wll, just nearly impossible to put down. From the opening scene in the unnamed fathers nighmare to the closing scenes it held my attention like few other novels have in recent years.

I cannot recommend this book enough. Read it, I believe you will not be disappointed.

Over my head
I read it. But being a post-apocalyptic fan, this story felt short. The relationship between the father and the son was endearing, but the simplicity of the story which most people seemed to enjoy was actually what I enjoyed the least. It felt like I was watching an incredibly slow movie that would end up getting an Oscar.

Everyone is entitled to they're own opinion, but for post-apoc fans, I don't think you'll dig this one too much. But hey I might be wrong. I def was annoyed by the language throughout the whole book. But then again I didn't see what the big deal was abt. No Country for Old men either, so gauge this review on that.