4.5 stars

If you find yourself being to happy and upbeat and need to tone it down, read this book. It's end of the world survival. The main characters are a man and his very young son. Some of the scenes are devastating and heartbreaking. It's very well-written. I had loads of feels. I hung on every word. It slayed me. (

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ToniFGMAMTC | Jan 19, 2017 |

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ToniFGMAMTC | Jan 19, 2017 |

Pretty dreary. May be realistic, but it's not a "fun" read!

Makes you think about how you would interact with other people when your survival was at stake. (

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flyboysgu | Jan 13, 2017 |

I know I read this soon after it came out in 2008 or so, but I had forgotten much of it. I don't think it's as carefully wrought as some of McCarthy's other work, and I miss the historical richness of the Border trilogy, but in its absolutely raw and single-minded dedication to a single idea--a father's love for his son--the book is a tour-de-force. The ending of the novel, when the father dies, devastated me. (

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jalbacutler | Jan 10, 2017 |

Bleak, desolate and depressing; yet paradoxically uplifting and heartwarming. (

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bensdad00 | Jan 10, 2017 |

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▾Published reviews

11 reviews

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thingScore 68

But McCarthy’s latest effort, The Road, is a missed opportunity.

added by eereed | editThe New Criterion, Stefan Beck (Oct 3, 2011)

With only the corpse of a natural world to grapple with, McCarthy's father and son exist in a realm rarely seen in the ur-masculine literary tradition: the domestic. And from this unlikely vantage McCarthy makes a big, shockingly successful grab at the universal.

added by eereed | editSlate, Jennifer Egan (Oct 10, 2006)

“The Road” is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy’s signature, but this time in restrained doses — short, vivid sentences, episodes only a few paragraphs or a few lines long, which is yet another departure for him.

added by eereed | editNew York Times Book Review, William Kennedy (Oct 8, 2006)

Post-apocalyptic fiction isn't automatically better when written by Cormac McCarthy, but he does have a way of investing genre clichés with fine gray tones and morose poetry.

added by eereed | editA.V. Club, Noel Murray (Oct 5, 2006)

But even with its flaws, there's just no getting around it: The Road is a frightening, profound tale that drags us into places we don't want to go, forces us to think about questions we don't want to ask. Readers who sneer at McCarthy's mythic and biblical grandiosity will cringe at the ambition of The Road . At first I kept trying to scoff at it, too, but I was just whistling past the graveyard. Ultimately, my cynicism was overwhelmed by the visceral power of McCarthy's prose and the simple beauty of this hero's love for his son.

added by eereed | editWashington Post, Ron Charles (Oct 1, 2006)

It is a survival guide on how to design shoes out of tarp, replace a shopping-cart wheel, and siphon gas from a stove. McCarthy’s project is to render these objects strange—as remnants of an alien race—until they gain the power to instill awe and terror, a reenchantment of the world. A well-preserved sextant unexpectedly stirs the father, cans of peaches are handled like sacred chalices, and unknown tracks in the asphalt reduce the boy to tears.

added by paradoxosalpha | editThe Believer, R. Emmet Sweeney (Oct 1, 2006)

“The Road” offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be.

added by jlelliott | editThe New York Times, Janet Maslin (Sep 25, 2006)

As usual with McCarthy's writing, most of the normal apparatus of English prose is missing: no quotation marks, few capitals, few apostrophes and fewer commas. Sentences are mostly fragmentary, and dialogue is minimal. Typically, McCarthy salts his language with unusual or coined words: "claggy," "disclets," "nitty," "meconium," "rachitic," "salitter," "crozzled," "bolus," "woad," "parsible." Even a Yiddish word, "tokus."

added by MikeBriggs | editHouston Chronicle, Earl L. Dachslager (Sep 22, 2006)

One of McCarthy's best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal, "The Road" would be the ideal coda to a body of work that now spans 10 books over 40 years.

added by eereed | editLos Angeles Times, Steve Erickson (Sep 6, 2001)

Like Steinbeck, McCarthy shepherds his protagonists from an apocalypse of man's making into a hell where man himself is the scourge. Like Steinbeck, McCarthy never holds more than a fistful of scavenged victuals between his heroes and death. And like Steinbeck, McCarthy conjures from this pitiless flight the miracle of unswerving humanity. Astonishingly, this is a book about grace.

added by johnsmithsen | editrumah minimalis

Through his scaled-down view of a post-apocalypse American east, McCarthy has discovered a rich, engrossing landscape that is distinctly his own. It’s a horrible pleasure to watch the father and his son make their way through it, even as one remains unsure whether it would be more humane to hope for their survival or hope for their gentle death.

added by eereed | editThe Quarterly Conversation

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▾Other authors

» Add other authors (16 possible)

Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
McCarthy, Cormac	—	primary author	all editions	confirmed
Preis, Thomas	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Stechschulte, Tom	Reader	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Testa, Martina	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed

▾Work-to-work relationships

Has the adaptation

The Road [2009 film] by John Hillcoat

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▾Common Knowledge

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Series (with order)

Canonical title

The Road

Original title

The Road

Alternative titles

Original publication date

People/Characters

Important places

United States of America

Southeastern North America

Important events

Related movies

The Road (2009 ∙ IMDb)

Awards and honors

Pulitzer Prize (Fiction, 2007)

James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Fiction, 2006)

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (2006)

Oprah's Book Club selection (March 28, 2007)

SF Site Editor's Choice (2006)

(show all 21 items)

Epigraph

Dedication

This book is dedicated to John Francis McCarthy

First words

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

Quotations

He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation (149).

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.

You forget some things, don't you?

Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond fell away on every side. It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.

He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.

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Last words

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Disambiguation notice

Publisher's editors

Blurbers

Shepard, Sam

Publisher series

Information from the German Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.

rororo (24600)

Original language

English

▾References

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (1)

The Road

▾LibraryThing members' description

Book description

The Road follows a man and a boy, father and son, journeying together for many months across a desolate, post-apocalyptic landscape, some years – the period of time almost the same as the age of the boy – after a great, unexplained cataclysm.

Haiku summary

His world burned away,
A man walks seaward;
Tries to save the son.
(miken32)

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▾Library descriptions

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.

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