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: #61 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-28
• Released on: 2007-03-28
• 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

Unending, Tedious, Oppressive Nihilism
Cormac McCarthy in the Writer's Alamanac for July 20, 2008 is quoted as saying, "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous"

I think HIS ideas and books are dangerous, depressive, and non-productive.

The Road exemplifies his nihilistic viewpoint, and is a waste of precious reading time. Read "Happier" by Tal Ben-Shahar instead.

Heartwrenching. A slow burn up to the worthwhile end.
Of course I'd heard plenty about this book before I picked it up, and I was afraid it would be overrated and since my expectations were high I'd be disappointed. I wasn't.

You know the plot is about a man and his young son who spend their days moving from the northern U.S. to the south after the world has turned into a postapocolyptic ash-covered graveyard, and every moment is a struggle to survive.

The beauty in this book is the way McCarthy delivers simple, touching phrases in description and dialogue. The relationship between the man and the boy is so perfectly perfectly strong. Their human love is so clear when the rest of the world is so grey.

It's weird. The plot wasn't action-packed, but I had to find out what happens to these two. I thought I'd ruined it by reading ahead to the last few pages while I was still in the middle of the story. But even though I expected what happens to happen... I still wasn't ready for it. The whole book was a slow burn up until the very end.

I was touched, moved, stirred, heartbroken, inspired. I wanted to wipe the tears from my eyes and call everyone I know to tell them I love them. It's a full day later and I could still crumble just thinking about it.

This book is entirely recommended.

The Breath of God
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is one of those rare novels which is capable of showing the great brutality inherent in human beings, alongside and contrasted with, our capacity for love, kindness, and charity, with unflinching equity. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where an unnamed man his unnamed son wander about a countryside of ashes and ruins, this terse, swift novel has a curiously uplifting biblical feel. In one chapter, the father and son meet an old man on the road named Ely, who admits Ely is not his real name, and refuses to reveal his true name. This is an echo of Jacob's wrestle with the man, or God, in Genesis, and the refusal of that mysterious combatant to give strenght to Jacob by revealing the inherent power in his very essence, the name by which he is called. The Road's prose is sparse, but McCarthy intersperses it with prophetic diction and phrases, giving hints at the real meaning of this novel: In a word seemingly abandoned by God, we become God's replacement. By even simple gestures of kindness and mercy, in a world where men and women act like animals to survive, we become godly; for McCarthy, being created in God's image means acting as God's stand in on a barren, dead earth. Powerful, gripping, sad, terror invoking and in the end hopeful, The Road is a fully realized, masterful work.