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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780307387899 |
Awards
 | 2007 Morning News Tournament of Books Winner |
2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Powells.com Staff Pick
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
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)
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)
"The Road is a much more compelling and demanding book than its predecessor....The new novel will not let the reader go, and will horribly invade his dreams, too....It is an interesting question as to why McCarthy succeeds so well. The secret, I think, is that McCarthy takes nothing for granted." James Wood, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic 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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About the Author
The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark.
In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press.
In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985.
After the retirement of Albert Erskine, McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing; the third volume, Cities of the Plain, was published in 1998.
McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and published in paperback by Vintage Books. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was published by Knopf in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize.
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 8 comments:
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Tracy Bock, April 3, 2008 (view all comments by Tracy Bock)
Absolutely powerful novel. You won't put this one down until the end. Amazingly descriptive.
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quinnkathy59, January 21, 2008 (view all comments by quinnkathy59)
I found this book starkly enticing.....memorable to the
point of, when time-constraints forced me to put it down
for a while, I found it nearly intolerable waiting till able to read it once again.
Opening in an already "dead " society, we find ourselves with a father and his son, (having lost the mother in the unnamed catasrophe), as they step carefully thru this new
barren world together. With each other, the only one they may trust, each page turn opens unto a new surprise/a new
terror........continuing this way to the end. EXCELLENT!
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houseslave01, January 9, 2008 (view all comments by houseslave01)
Sorry, but this is the worst book that I have ever read! I read till the end hoping that it would get better, but was disappointed. I suppose that, although I have enjoyed post-apocalyptic stories in the past, this is just too grim for me. There has to be something to focus the mind on besides bad things happening to the characters then more bad things happening to the characters. There is no explanation of what happened. There is no hope for better things to happen. I cannot find any art in this book, or any grace.
View all 8 comments
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780307387899
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Vintage Books USA
- Author:
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Fathers and sons
- Subject:
- Voyages and travels
- Edition Description:
- Paperback
- Series:
- Oprah's Book Club
- Publication Date:
- March 2007
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 287
- Dimensions:
- 8.03x5.15x.88 in. .73 lbs.
