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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780307265432 |
Awards
 | 2007 Morning News Tournament of Books Winner |
Powells.com Staff Pick
The Road is Cormac McCarthy's darkest, most poetic book in years. In a post-apocalyptic, razed landscape (which, though archetypal, feels frighteningly plausible), McCarthy poses questions of survival, good and evil, and what makes us human.
Recommended by Jill, Powells.com
Strike-me-dead beautiful and bleak — this is the book I put into every customer's hands. Absolutely the best thing out of 2006, and perhaps many years preceding, The Road reminds me of McCarthy's early novels, only matured to perfection.
Recommended by Donna, Powells.com (See all of our Staff Top 5s of 2006)
Being one of the few who didn't care for No Country for Old Men, I couldn't wait to read The Road. It is a spare, fierce novel, more a return to the writing in Outer Dark. It drew me in immediately; I didn't want to put it down, and kept reading until I finished it. It's an unsettling post-apocalyptic tale of a father and son making their way in an uncertain time without much use for conversation, just action and reaction. I didn't want a bleak, inhumane end for these two fragile souls, and McCarthy did leave a thread of hope. The Road is definitely the best book I have read in the last year or two.
Recommended by Brodie, Powells.com (See all of our Staff Top 5s of 2006)
Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)
"It's an adventure, believe it or not — the sort of book that, if only for the relentless clarity of the writing, the lucid descriptions of the grasses, the mud, the thorns, and the very arc of the road that cuts through all that, presents a clear and episodic progress from one small terror to the next. Forget comfort and possession. Postapocalypse or not, it's classic McCarthy....You should read this book because it is exactly what a book about our future ought to be: the knife wound of our inconvenient truths, laid bare in a world that will just plain scare the piss out of you on a windy night." Tom Chiarella, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
"The love between the father and the son is one of the most profound relationships McCarthy has ever written, and the strength of it helps raise the novel — despite considerable gore — above nihilistic horror....Fans of McCarthy's brutal world view may not approve, but other readers will welcome the unexpectedly hopeful ending." Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor (read the entire CSM review)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
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 wearting, 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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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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 13 comments:
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jrrkiddo, August 7, 2007 (view all comments by jrrkiddo)
I had this book sitting untouched for several weeks , once I opened the book a whole new scary world opened up to me. My thoughts are still running wild after having finished the book. My heart still aches. No other book has left such an impact in my soul as this one. This book is very thought provoking, and dismal but leaves the reader with a glimpse of hope.
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greentree32, July 14, 2007 (view all comments by greentree32)
I tried reading "Blood Meridian" but it was too violent. I did enjoy "All the Pretty Horses" and "The Crossing," but none of these comes close to the impact of "The Road," McCarthy's latest. The tension is relentless. It feels like a major wake-up call to Civilization.
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TNutZz, May 30, 2007 (view all comments by TNutZz)
In response to a recent reviewer below who questioned the credibility of the story due to the lack of animals; there was actually a moment in the story where the boy and the man heard a dog barking...and another stanza of very eloquent McCarthyesque prose that discusses the possibility of life remaining deep within the ash-covered ocean.
Also, its important to keep in mind that this story is of the last few weeks of the boy and mans time together. The devestation of the war would have been roughly ten years earlier. As you should recall, the wife/mother was pregnant when they saw the bomb blasts.
After ten years of nuclear winter; barren irradiated ground, and dwindling supplies, it would be certain that there would be almost no mammals and few humans. The surviving people would eat the animals before eating eachother; and the roving bands of cannibals were seen in the book.
I for one, found the book to be a phenominal juxtaposition between utter devestation and the transcendent beauty of innocence and hope. Like the man knew, the boy was his life, his heart, his soul and symbolic of the hope for the survival of mankind.
View all 13 comments
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780307265432
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Alfred A. Knopf
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Fathers and sons
- Subject:
- Voyages and travels
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Edition Number:
- 1st
- Publication Date:
- September 26, 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 241
- Dimensions:
- 9.56x6.02x1.16 in. 1.10 lbs.
