Cormac McCarthy

In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity. 250,000 first printing.

The Road

Sophia Bowers

Jemima Scott

With an introduction by novelist John Banville. In a burned-out America, a father and his young son walk under a darkened sky, heading slowly for the coast. They have no idea what, if anything, awaits them there. The landscape is destroyed, nothing moves save the ash on the wind and cruel, lawless men stalk the roadside, lying in wait. Attempting to survive in this brave new world, the young boy and his protector have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves. They must keep walking. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Road is an incandescent novel, the story of a remarkable and profoundly moving journey. In this unflinching study of the best and worst of humankind, Cormac McCarthy boldly divines a future without hope, but one in which, miraculously, this young family finds tenderness. An exemplar of post-apocalyptic writing, The Road is a true modern classic, a masterful, moving and increasingly prescient novel.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Prashanth Srivatsa

Heart wrenching. Terribly beautiful, and although the dialogues get repetitive over a period of time, the conversation between the old man and the survivors will remain as one of the most brilliant ones I've ever read.
 
One of those books that will look back after many decades and tell us all, "I told you so."

angie

In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity.

Megan Jones

neko

Just finished it, in tears. So bleak but I couldn't stop reading it. I didn't much like the writing style when I first started reading it (sentence fragments, missing punctuation, kind of a Stephen King style just-the-facts-ma'am thing going on), but either I got used to it or it started to seem right for the story.

Most postapocalyptic novels take place in the time directly after the breakdown of civilzation, in a world populated with feral animals or human cults fighting for survival; but this story is later, in a haunted and deserted world, a world where almost nothing remains. The main conflict is not human versus human or even human versus nature, but human versus despair.

The more I think about this book, the more I feel like there was a lot going on, despite the unadorned writing and the ambiguity of many of the plot elements. It's a story pared down to just the grim essentials, just as the man and boy found their lives reduced to a hopeless journey, one day at a time. McCarthy sketches in the vaguest of hints, leaving a lot of space for you to fill in the details from your own imagination. In an echo of the boy's life, you start the story somewhere in the middle, able only to infer what came before; and (view spoiler)[like the man's death, you leave the story with loose ends undone, with no assurance of what will happen after your part is done (hide spoiler)].

Overall, a little too gritty and realistic for me to want to read it twice. I hoped for some kind of redemption at the end, but McCarthy only offered up more ambiguity, as if to shrug and say "this is the best I can do, this is the world as it is."

I sense in it hints of Winter's Tale, though, and I love it for that. The barest implication that there is a hidden justice to the workings of the world, something wilder and more incomprehensible than a god, but present nonetheless. Or possibly just humans and the way we carry hope like a flame in our hearts, even in a world where the worst has come to pass and there is nothing left to hope for.

Jeannette Ordas

Boy that will teach me to not watch the movie of a book I want to read before reading said book. That said, I really loved this book but I'm sure I would have loved it a half star more if I hadn't watched the movie already, danggit. 4 1/2 stars for being as dark and grey and cold and horrible as a post-apocalyptic world should be while trying to hold on to the fire.

tiff

Yes. The sentences were short and choppy, full of supposedly uninteresting detail. We see the man- he is whittling wood to make fake bullets to fill the empty chambers in the pistol they are carrying for protection. We get the very minute details of this action. It has turned some off of the book, along with the metaphors that seemed to be piled one on the other, but to me that was the charm of the book. The everyday encumbrances of the man and the boy, living in a semi-inhabitable land laid to waste by what I assume to be a world-wide nuclear holocaust (don't quote me on this- there was mention of fire in a flashback and people are burnt into the macadam in other parts of the book which is where I'm drawing my conclusions from). Everyday it takes courage to get up, to move on, to starve, to be thirsty, to look for shelter, to smell badly, to kill others or be killed. The details were necessary, for the most part, to ensure the reader feels what the man and boy call "the fire" that they both are carrying. Get to that in a moment.

I had to look up words, which is no drawback if you are reading on an ereader (at least not for me). I thought that using some of the words like "truncheoned" which don't exist anymore was a bit of pretense on McCarthy's part but he's such a brilliant writer that I excused it.

The man lied to the boy a lot. The boy was precocious and knew quite a bit about life and to some this seemed implausible, especially for a child so young. But it was important to the narrative, to show how a brave man, father, protector knew so little about their existence. The boy was my favorite character, and at the end I almost cried for him. But I digress.

The fire that they carried. The fire that the man's wife didn't have or want to have. The will to survive in a dead world. The good guys. To get up everyday knowing existence wasn't to exist, that everything has died or will die someday. That fire was the whole point of the book. The details, the precocious little boy, that was all great and kept me reading but the heart of the book, the light in all that death was the will to survive and carry on when all is lost. I don't know what I'd do if I survived a nuclear holocaust. I'm not sure I'm brave enough to keep going or brave enough to kill myself. What I do know is this book was magnificent and I will be rereading it for years to come.

andrea

dnf-ing this at 50% even if i should finish it for class because very few times in my life have i encountered a prose so tedious, repetitive, and insipid. everything about this book is so dull and flat, oh my god. i just can't bring myself to continue

Janice Hopper

I wasn't going to read thousands book because I thought it would be too bleak for me. I don't do well with bleak these days. But a Twitter exchange with someone whose book opinions I respect convinced me to give it a try. 

I read it in one sitting. And yes, it's bleak, but it's not soul-destroying bleakness. I don't see much future for the characters in the novel. There's a saying I think of sometimes: "The end is in the beginning. Nevertheless, we go on." The story in this book is kinda like that.

Georgia Carr

This book just wasn't for me, and it was really hard to finish it. It started well, but quickly got repetitive and annoying. 

I can't understand why there are no speech marks or apostrophes, either. I mean, I know it's supposed to add to the atmosphere of the book, but really? Ignoring basic grammar to create realism? Nah. No thank you.

Sam Missingham

This book didn't just leave an impression on me, it made me weep for humanity. I can honestly say no other book has ever left me feeling so bereft and gutted to my stomach.

La strada

gio☕

3.5/5

Era un po' di tempo che aspettavo di leggere questo libro, di cui ho sentito parlare per lo piů bene. Non avevo idea, assolutamente idea, di che cosa parlasse; sapevo solo che c'erano un padre, un figlio e una strada.
Non avevo aspettative di nessun genere, né in positivo, né in negativo. Non so esattamente cosa pensare di questo libro, se non che è stato, insieme alla maggior parte dei libri che sto leggendo in questo 2022, un grande "mah". Ho faticato a proseguire la lettura, lettura che, visto il numero di pagine, si potrebbe finire anche in un solo giorno (infatti oggi, quando l'ho finito, ho letto da pagina 70 fino all'ultima, sforzandomi di concluderlo, perché, davvero, era solo un pensiero in più che avevo, un pensiero fisso e disturbante).
Mi ha incuriosito? Non direi, no. Mi sono piaciute le prime pagine, ma poi ho avuto la sensazione che, a mano a mano che andavo avanti a leggere, diventasse tutto troppo ripetitivo: loro camminano, trovano una casa/rifugio, prendono cibo e utensili utili, incontrano o morti o cattivi e camminano di nuovo e tutto ricomincia da capo. E tutto questo in un mondo finito, post-apocalittico, che però non viene mai palesato come tale. Si dice solo che tutto era finito e che non esisteva più niente, più nessuno, a parte pochi, pochissimi esseri umani. Perché non c'è una vera trama, un intreccio narrativo, uno sviluppo della storia. Perché forse, in realtà, non c'è affatto una storia e non c'è la volontà di presentarla come tale. C'è una narrazione, una breve e poetica - e questo è l'aspetto più lodevole del libro - narrazione di fatti avvenuti in un arco di tempo imprecisato in un luogo altrettanto imprecisato. Ma è perfetto così, perché non serve precisare proprio niente, non qui, non dove non esiste più né tempo né spazio, non dove l'apocalisse c'è stata e il mondo è finito.
Ho letto di persone a cui ha turbato lo stile della scrittura. A me, invece, è ciò che è piaciuto di più. Mi piacevano questi dialoghi, questa sorta di flusso di coscienza (e mi è piaciuto tanto perché mi ha ricordato la mia Virginia Woolf), dialoghi che dominano la storia, che la tengono viva, che la fanno scorrere. Sono dialoghi vivi, più importanti di qualunque cosa che, in questo libro, dialogo non è. È con le parole dette a voce che si capisce cosa sta accadendo e chi sono i protagonisti: padre e figlio. Un padre che, in principio, ci viene presentato esclusivamente come "l'uomo", e un figlio che, all'inizio, è solo "il bambino". Non li si presenta immediatamente come padre e figlio e ho trovato interessante come la loro relazione possa rappresentare, per esteso, l'universale interazione del mondo adulto con quello infantile, senza che si sia necessariamente legati dal sangue, dalla parentela. Ma, a parte questo, il rapporto padre-figlio è la vera bellezza del libro, a parer mio, sebbene sia un rapporto quasi totalmente privo di evoluzione, come tutto il resto della narrazione, d'altronde.
Ci sono diversi punti interrogativi che mi porterò dietro sempre, probabilmente, riguardo la vera e più profonda intenzione, lo scopo di McCarthy donandoci questo suo libro. Ho un conto in sospeso con questa storia, devo prendermi il tempo necessario per capirla, per dirmi "ok, ecco il perché di tutto", anche se, forse, qualcosa ho già capito.
Un'ultima cosa, però: la poesia, la musicalità dei paragrafi... Vale la pena leggerlo solo per questo.

This book was a very straight forward, yet incredible story. Had to do 4.5/5 mainly because No Country For Old Men by Cormac is a 10/5 stars for me and this didn’t quite hit that mark. 

Laura Walden

Ali Saleh

As sad as it gets, I wish if the author gave them names though.

La carretera

Enrique Nuno

Todd Luallen

I can't give a review without spoiling it. I can just say that I think it's an excellent book. It is very dark, as just about every review will mention. So prepare yourself.

Chiyeung lau

My biggest gripes with the book was the language and the boy. I understand that the sparse language was representative of what they were going through and the world they lived in, but it drove me crazy at times due to it's repetition and dullness. However, one can argue that this repetition and scarcity in language symbolizes the drudgery of their day to day, so I can understand why McCarthy wrote in the style that he did.

The boy in the story struck a nerve because he was so coddled by his father. Shouldn't you be teaching your son how to do things on his own, just in case you die?

Aside from these two minor issues, I loved this book and despite the writing style, I pressed on to the end. I loved the idea of a father and son, traversing the wastelands, being the blip of light in a sea of darkness. I saw my own father in the man and I realized that no matter how dark the world can be, there is still hope as long as there is love and family. Pretty cheesy, but I believe it.

The road

Rick Dobrowolski

One Man - One Boy - One Journey.

This book was my first introduction to Cormac McCarthy, and it has whet my appetite for more.

An unnamed father and son take a journey across a post-apocalytpic landscape, braving starvation and depravity, searching for the other "good guys," and all the while carrying "the fire" inside of them.

Not once is love spoken about, but it is obviously shown.

The book screams intimacy in a cold, calloused world.

Just don't read this book if you need everything resolved, or you will leave it frustrated. Otherwise, enjoy it.

Ashutosh

4.5. I read about this book on reddit, and I gotta say this was one hell of a ride. The setting is post apocalyptic, and it's a story about a Father and his son surviving through such dreadful times. A really fast-paced and engaging read. I teared up a bit towards the end. Definitely a must read!!.

Started reading to calm my mind and fall asleep in the evening. Finished at 4 AM with my heart pounding. Gripping. Dark.

Vojtech

The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which a father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love.
(back cover)

Jenna

How have I read so many post apocalyptic books and somehow missed reading this one until now?! This book is beautiful. It is heartbreaking and thought provoking. The nameless characters could be so many of us. 

The writing in this book is right up my alley. The repetition and the prose really worked for me. I couldn't put this book down. So often I don't enjoy books without an obvious plot, or lack of background, but this book didn't need those things. The feelings were enough.

This should be required reading. What have I even been doing with my life? Apparently I live under a rock since this is the first Cormac McCarthy I've ever read. I'm glad I read this. New favorite.

Geoffrey Landward

I just finished reading this about five minutes ago, so I am still overcoming the urge kill myself. Nonetheless, I can't say enough about this book; actually, I can't seem to say anything. As a father of a young boy, this book was extremely difficult for me to read but even more difficult to put down. The prose was gorgeous, the imagery nightmarish. I've never read a book that was so disheartening yet so hopeful. Books rarely affect my outlook on weightier things, but this book will have a profound effect on my feeling for my children. Read it, but expect to be devastated.

Helen Ball

Nick Ringwood

Beautifully written
Excellent descriptions

Pretty good ending, overall
Some parts dragged on
Middle section, really
Repetitive, but beautiful and poetic in it’s descriptions, really was able to picture the things he talked about a lot

The Road

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