The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
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 Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the 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.
One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the 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.
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Readers say *The Road* offers a powerful, vivid portrayal of a father-son bond in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world. Reviewers agree on McCarthy’s strik...
I was intrigued all throughout, but I was too often reminded of that very deliberate minimalism I found in “Slaughterhouse Five” that strikes me as more of a gimmick than anything else. I love minimalism in art (Robert Bresson is one of my favorite film directors and I loved Camus’s “The Stranger”), but the manipulative strings of McCarthy’s craft show a bit too much for my taste here. I think “Blood Meridian”, despite being a more ambitious and self-indulgent work, managed to better retain a more subtle economy of language within its sprawling prose that allowed it to reach a profundity I didn’t quite find in “The Road”.
McCarthy's prose is both sparse and poetic, which drew me as a reader into the story's harrowing journey. This book is a profound exploration of love, hope, and the enduring human spirit.
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