Product Description

A father and his son walk alone through burned America, heading through the ravaged landscape to the coast. This is the profoundly moving story of their journey. "The Road" boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which two people, '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. 'The first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation. Here is an American classic which, at a stroke, makes McCarthy a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature ...An absolutely wonderful book that people will be reading for generations' - Andrew O'Hagan. 'A work of such terrible beauty that you will struggle to look away' - Tom Gatti, "The Times". 'So good that it will devour you, in parts. It is incandescent' - Niall Griffiths, "Daily Telegraph". 'You will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled, mesmerised. All the modern novel can do is done here' - Alan Warner, "Guardian".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #169 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-01
• Original language: English
• 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

Harsh but beautiful
Having read several other opinions I decided to set myself a challenge and attempt to write a review of this book without using the word 'bleak'. Oops.

The Road is a tale of a nameless father and son travelling along a road to an unknown destination in a world devastated by an unidentified apocalyptic event. The non-description in that sentance sums up how little description and discovery McCarthy gives us in the book, but in the same way the scariest horror films leave the terrible sights to your imagination, the titbits of information that are given and the overhanging sense of fear make The Road frightening and compelling.

Despite joking about it being bleak, I actually thought there was some element of hope in the story. The young boy represents innocence and is innately kind and generous to others, even though he has apparently only known these dreadful surroundings and witnessed evidence of man's atrocities. And the ending appears to re-afirm the fathers earlier belief that good luck happens to good people.

It is not the sort of book to be read over a long period of time, dipping into here and there. I think it would seem boring and possibly confusing as there is little to fix on to tell you where you last left the plot. But given the full attention it deserves it can't help but move you.

Flawed but unputdownable
I've read all of Cormac McCarthy's books and have loved many of them. He can be a truly great writer and seemed to be becoming more and more muscular and spare, as seen in No Country For Old Men, and then we get this. It took me a long time (nearly a hundred pages)to get into The Road and to find my way past the hammy, self-conscious mannerisms, and then I did. From there on it was extraordinarily visual and cinematic, and I might have forgiven it every flaw if the ending hadn't been such a cop-out. It's worth reading but it's not worth the Nobel, or any other, prize. Blood Meridian is a much better book.

A fine copy of Grapes of Wrath
It's an interesting book for McCarthy to have written, but comes across rather affected in places.

If you've read some of his others, you'll be familiar witht he hard, sparse prose, the wonky or absent punctuation and the rythmic-poetic metre of the storytelling. What is different here is that the sentences are much shortened (compared with The Crossing or Pretty Horses for example)....and that's when I started to smell the rat.

McCarthy is trying to write a modern-day Grapes of Wrath. He has aped Steinbeck's short, compact prose. He's copied the allegorical journey into a dysfunctional world. He's even borrowed the slender-thread-of-hope-from-human-kindness ending. The interspersing of greater themes into otherwise ordinary narrative is there too, and so is the keystone-based descriptive mannerism (gray gray gray gray).

I liked the book. It's a good copy...but it *is* a copy.

J