Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
Mesmerising... The best novel I read last year was McCarthy's No County for Old Men. I shall be astonished if this year I read anything better than The Road. --Mail on Sunday

Guardian
'Stunning...This is a shocking and brilliant work, at once
terribly pertinent and impressively universal.'

Mail on Sunday
`Mesmerising... The best novel I read last year was McCarthy's No County
for Old Men. I shall be astonished if this year I read anything better than
The Road.'

Customer Reviews

bleak and intensly believable
the spare style is perfect for the mood of this book. there are no wasted words to distract you from it's grinding inevitability. each dialogue is a tender vignette.

A modern classic
The main appeal for me was the post-apocolyptic setting and the scenario of day-to-day survival. This is such an interesting topic as Cormac McCarthy gives to us a month's journey which brings every aspect of being into question.
The man and his son are forced to travel across the ruin that is now America. Disaster of some kind (Poss Nuclear) is evident and it looks pretty certain that the world has suffered as a single body. Nothing grows, the winds are colder and humanity is sparse - to the point of extinction.
The road is a bleak tale with redemption found in simple things such as the finding of food and clothing. Cormac McCarthy describes in alarming surreality the bonds that tie us and what we would have to do in times of ultimate peril.
So what makes the road so engrossing?
The style of McCarthy's writing for this particular story is not the standard affair and the descriptions are so desperately real the reader has no choice but to put his/herself into the mind of the protagonist.
There are some pretty grim scenes in this story which will stay with you a long time...but the true horror is realising what we, as a race, will do to survive.
This is the kind of read that stays with you long after the last page has been turned. The theme of survival and emotional crisis are strong, not once does the book lose sight of its goal and the reader does get carried along, albeit stressfully. I found the first quarter of the story to be utterly depressing and I just couldnt see hope...

This is a fantastic book. At times uneventful, at other times bitterly realistic...what more can I say.

Indelible
As a fairly new parent Ive spent moments imagining worst case scenario's relating to my son and the emptiness that must follow. This book gave me that same wrenching physical feeling of loss, only magnified to levels I had never imagined. Loss of everything including, in the darkest moments where bravery gives way to reality, hope. No fiction has ever made me feel so desperately sad. For me the scenario isnt what hurts, its the love.