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    The Road: Pulitzer Prize Winner
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    The Road: Pulitzer Prize Winner
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    The Road: Pulitzer Prize Winner
    Ebook242 pages3 hours

    The Road: Pulitzer Prize Winner

    By Cormac McCarthy

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). • From the bestselling author of The Passenger

    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 wearing, 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.

    Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateMar 20, 2007
    ISBN9780307267450
    Unavailable
    The Road: Pulitzer Prize Winner
    Author

    Cormac McCarthy

    Cormac McCarthy was the author of many acclaimed novels, including Blood Meridian, Child of God and The Passenger. Among his honours are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country for Old Men – the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. McCarthy died in 2023 in Santa Fe, NM at the age of 89.

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    Reviews for The Road

    3.5/5

    173 ratings773 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This is one of my top 5 books. It's a stark and uncompromising work and reflects Cormac McCarthy gift for direct narrative. Readers of McCarthy's other masterwork Blood Meridian will recall the cadence and sentence construction that is really evident in this book. As pointed out by Harold Bloom, McCarthy's prose is redolent of that in the King James Bible and in his hands this adds to the overall impression of threat and doom, ultimately reversed by the ending where the man dies, but the boy survives with hopeful prospects of some sort of renewal. I can understand that some readers may be disturbed by this book but even so they should recognise the high quality of the writing.
    • 3/5
      A father and son walking through the remains of America, after what seems like a nuclear war or some other disaster. It is never mentioned in the book, although there are little look back through the story.
    • 3/5
      Such a dark and depressing book. I remember watching the movie. I would hope that our world would never get to become this horribly depressing and dangerous where all you are trying to do is survive and not be killed by others.
    • 3/5
      A man and his son travel through post-apocalyptic America.Whenever a Big, Earthshaking, Oprah-Loved-It-And-Everyone-Must-Read-It-Or-Else book comes along, I expect to be the lone voice of dissent. I’m going to hate it. It’s going to flop for me. I’m going to wonder what the hell everyone else is thinking.Of course, I almost always love it.This time, I figured I’d skip a step and just expect to love THE ROAD from the get-go. And wouldn’t you know it, but I can’t say as I did.I did like it. I found it readable and evocative and all that jazz. But I’m almost certain I’ll have forgotten all about it by this time next week.I feel like some sort of an emotional cripple. Everyone else on the planet thinks THE ROAD was a total sob-fest, filled with poignant contemplations on the nature of love and devotion and meaning and spirituality and seven million other wonderful things. And I mean, I know it was, but I rarely felt it.I got it. I may be an emotional cripple, but an intellectual dunce I ain’t. I done my time on the literature front, my dears. I done it good. And I’ll tell you, you could get a couple dozen paper topics out of this book wicked easy. You could spend a week or two discussing it in class. There’s a lot to mull over here, a lot to think about and paw through and ramble on about. I can think of about a thousand discussion questions I’d like to take a class through.I mean, how many people have mentioned McCarthy’s sparse prose in your (glowing) reviews? There’s a paper or two just in the way he’s pared everything down. Why do some contractions deserve apostrophes while others dont? How do the absent quotation marks influence our reaction to the dialogue? How do the many brief scenes drive the narrative forward? What’s going on with that one chunk of first person in the sea of third? Would you that the nameless characters, divorced from pre-apocalypse social norms, allow us to insert ourselves into the text? Etc. etc.Then there’s the world itself. Why do you think McCarthy never tells us just what happened? Do you think it’s important to know how society reached this state? How does McCarthy show us the tension between the father/son duo and the rest of society? Between the man and the boy themselves? In what ways does hunger drive the story forward? How would the book be different if the man and the boy traveled through a warm wasteland? Is THE ROAD science fiction masquerading as literature or literature masquerading as science fiction? In what ways does it coincide with and diverge from our expectations of both literature and science fiction?So there’s a lot here. It’s an intellectually stimulating book. There were moments, too, when I came this close to realizing what everyone was on about. (There’s a particularly good scene where the man and the boy cower in the gutter while a cannibalistic convoy rolls along past them. It chilled me). I could tell you all about how the story's many layers appealed to me, and how I found that McCarthy's approach drove the story onwards in some interesting ways. But at day’s end, I feel all right about passing this book along. I'm pretty sure I'll try more of McCarthy's work in the future, but I won’t need to read this one again.(A slightly different version of this review originally appeared on my blog, Stella Matutina).
    • 3/5
      I wanted to like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I really did. But, unfortunately, this was just not to be. At first I thought it was only a stylistic issue, but now I'm not so sure. It's not that it's a bad book, I mean it won a Pulitzer among other things, it just didn't do anything for me personally. Since finishing The Road I have discussed it with many other people, most of who thought it was brilliant or at least liked it, and my opinion towards the book has improved somewhat as a result. I can at least begin to appreciate aspects of it, even if I didn't particularly enjoy it.The Road is a rather bleak story of a son and his father as they travel along a road south, struggling to survive after an unknown disaster has befallen the Earth. The event happened before the boy was born, transforming the planet into an utter wasteland where everything has died or is dying. Few humans are left--not to mention civilization--and dwindling resources have forced people toward violence and even cannibalism, doing literally anything and everything they can to survive. The world is an extremely dangerous place and the road they are following is a particularly hostile environment. The father is doing all he can to ensure his son's survival--which is the only thing keeping him alive.The story in it's entirety seemed a bit predictable to me. I wasn't shocked, or really surprised, with anything that happened. Additionally, a general pattern of "We're doing okay, now we're starving, oh look! we found an undisturbed cache of supplies" developed which detracted from the whole story. The ending of the book made little sense to me, at least if taken literally. Actually, there were several things, if I stop to think about them, that didn't really really fit with story's background--mostly dealing with the boy's interactions with the world around him. He was raised in this world, knowing nothing of what came before except through his father's stories, but he doesn't really act like it. (It might have helped if we knew how old the boy was, but I'm not sure.) However, I did like that over time the father slowly changed from keeping them both alive to teaching his son how to survive on his own after he would die (without explicitly telling him so).Now to some of the stylistic elements: The two main characters are never given names, which can be confusing since they're both male. ("Wait, Cormac, which he are you talking about now?") Actually, none of the people have names. This is fine, and can be quite effective, except that McCarthy doesn't quite pull it off well enough to avoid confusion. To add to the confusion, the story itself isn't entirely linear and it is completely fragmentary. The prose is at times quite provocative and poetic, but is often just awkward--I'm not even sure it was always comprehensible English. Finally, no quotation marks are used, so dialogue is sometimes hard to distinguish from the rest of the writing. And apostrophes can apparently be used for words like "it's" but never for "dont" or "cant."I expected to like this book (it's exactly the type of book I normally do enjoy) but I was ultimately disappointed. I really wasn't that impressed with it--mostly a stylistic thing, I think. The story was a good one, despite it's flaws--the presentation just didn't work for me. Overall though, the book didn't seem to have much of a point. At least for me, anyways. I know quite a few people who really like this book. And it did win a Pulitzer, so it must have some merit.Experiments in Reading
    • 5/5
      The Road is bleak and forbidding and utterly beautiful. You know from early on that no happy ending is possible in this desolate future world. Everything is burned to ash, there is little sunlight, nothing growing, only a few desperate souls left alive. And yet, a father keeps going for the sake of his son, born in the aftermath of whatever catastrophe brought down the world.I am a fan of post-apocalyptic stories — what happens after the nuclear war, after the meteor’s impact, after some third world government’s experiments in biological warfare wipe out half the planet. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with as little cause for hope as this one. There is simply nothing left; the ragged bits of humanity that remain have consumed everything that was not burned. In the face of such destruction, you cannot hope to come over a hill and find a green valley. Eventually, the last survivors will consume each other and the world will be a dead rock in space — and yet, people go on. What makes a man keep walking, keep fighting, keep hoping? Is that how he proves his love, or would it be kinder to end it all?Read my full review at When Falls the Coliseum.
    • 5/5
      This story remains seared in my mind. It was so disturbing, and yet so thought-provoking. I love all his work, but this one stands alone.
    • 5/5
      Astounding use of sparse language to create a bleak and desolate world. Captivating and darkly fascinating story and writing.
    • 4/5
      This is a classic dystopian novel. After a world-ending firestorm event (probably nuclear) a man and his pregnant wife leave their city apartment and take to the road. She soon gives birth. Sometime later, she is no longer able to continue onward and disappears, presumably ending her life.Several years have passed and we follow the man and the boy (neither named) as they struggle through a gray ash-covered landscape. The sun itself cannot be seen in the smoke and atmospheric debris. There does not seem to be any living plant life, although they did find a few morels. (The total lack of plant life seems far-fetched to me). They forage in not yet looted houses for food, shoes and blankets; they sometimes starve. They avoid 'the bad guys' as the boy calls them; those who exist through cannibalism. They hope to get to the sea shore and to a more southern warmer climate before winter. The boy especially, hopes to find more good people – those his father says 'carry the fire' of humanity.The man's lungs have been compromised by the smoke and he becomes weaker; they trudge forward.I found this bleak but compelling. I'll give it 4 stars.I also found it a bit frustrating – it's the city-dwellers' apocalypse. They found apples, but didn't save the seeds. They found a few packets of seeds in a farmhouse and saved them but they never were mentioned again. And they weren't acknowledged as the end product of literally thousands of years of human/agriculture evolution. What a treasure! They crossed a dried out swamp with the 'rushes' burnt and bent over – Cattails? The roots are edible and can even be made into flour.A book on foraging would have done them in good stead. Not an abandoned library, or books in various houses were mentioned, except for a few that were ruined by water or used as fuel.Hint: In case of apocalypse stop at the nearest un-looted library.
    • 3/5
      A post-apocalyptic story about only 2 main characters: "The Man" and "The Boy" . The entire story they are on a journey , "south". Most of the time, they don't know where they are , only that that they are on the road, and must not stay in one place very long. The world they are surviving is cold with only devastated landscape and powder ash everywhere. Trees and pants are all dead and there are no birds or animals. The sun is shrouded so life doesn't have a chance to renew. The man and boy live in constant vigilance of the "bad guys", and call themselves "good guys". It is not explained as to how the world came to be destroyed, but they believed that somewhere, there must be people who are "good guys" like themselves. It is not even clear as to how much of the world is destroyed but without communication or transportation, your world becomes only as big as your two feet can carry you. .......It began so miserably and was so depressing I almost just returned it to the library. The first 3 disks carried on with droning and hopelessness. By the end of the third disk, some hope came into their lives and I finished the book. .........I wondered throughout the book if this is going to be a political commentary on nuclear build up, global warming, or what. All the reader knows is that the destruction came suddenly; people melted in their cars, landscape devastated, corpses rotted or already back to dust...but the Man remembered what it was like before the event, but the reader is not told. It could have even been from a meteor shower. There are no clues given in the dialogue as to whether it was natural or man caused so that is not the point of the story. You decide what the point is to you. The narration was wonderful, but not a story I would ever want to listen to again. However, it does make you think how you would react/respond in the same situation. The story causes you to examine your values in life.
    • 4/5
      (Original Review, 2006-09-30)“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”In “The Road” by Cormac McCarthyTo me this novel raises the question in how far literature should be exempt from moral judgements. "It's art!" has never been a good excuse for producing something disturbing. Torture itself can be done artfully and writing a story painful enough to disturb the reader for weeks or more should not be done without a good reason. Sure, we need disturbing, because things can't keep going the way they are. That's why I admire McCarthy's "The Road". But does the abyss of horror have a bottom which we can plumb to dispel the fear that it is bottomless, or is there always a greater horror that need to be explored and we are eventually forced to retreat, beaten and deeply hurt, when we can't take any more. Should we spend our lives engaging with the very worst we can think of, or would we do better to know these things exist and act to keep them down without looking at them to closely?I wonder the same myself especially in the age of the Internet. We used to be somewhat shielded from extreme horror, unless we were directly linked to it or chose to pick up a book such as American Psycho- in that instance we make a definite choice to engage with horror, albeit in a remote, two-dimensional way, i.e. through the pages of a paperback which we can put down at any time.Now, with the careless clicks of our laptops or by simply touching a screen, the world of true horror is laid bare whether it's through terrorists posting its latest horrible execution or mistakenly finding yourself in a very disturbing Twitter feed (done that myself & trying to dislodge it from my brain weeks later...).The distinction between "mythical" and "realistic" is not a bad starting point if we want to write about “The Road” - but it's quickly exhausted in the face of the variety of 'real' and fanciful world-disclosive techniques in literature. “Blood Meridian” is carefully 'realistic' in the sense that, for example, the characters kill and die as people did and do beyond the pale of civility. Because it's so unrelievedly violent and discompassionate, I'd call it "fantastic" or "phantasmagorical" or some such categorization, but McCarthy's sentences and phrases aren't unspooled at the expense of the characters feeding themselves realistically, say, or of the natural verisimilitude of south-western botany and geology, and so on.It's not where Cormack writes about is HOW he writes it. And he writes beautifully.Can true horror really be woven into literature? Or does the horror dominate so that is the only thing we really remember from such books? How do we benefit from immersing ourselves in this horror?I'm not sure.
    • 5/5
      In this austere and brutal post-apocalyptic tale, McCarthy’s prose recreates the desolation and despair that the end of the world has engendered. While the cause of the Earth’s apocalypse is merely hinted at (everything is covered in ash, so nuclear winter is a plausible inference), its effects are inescapable—and they are encapsulated in this tale of a nameless man and his nameless son, their relationship a microcosm of humankind’s struggle to survive—physically, morally, and spiritually—amidst hopelessness and destruction.Everything about this novel is bare—the dialogue, the action, the plot. McCarthy can’t even be bothered to spare quotation marks or apostrophes. The minimalist dialogue lacks the usual stylistic markers of punctuation, and rarely is a speaker identified. The reader is thus obligated to concentrate clearly on the verbal exchanges throughout the novel (the majority of which take place between the man and the boy); the spare prose of these conversations carries weighty subtext, and so few words contain such profound meaning that the prose is elevated to poetic power.The few “action” scenes contained in this tale are genuinely gruesome and brutal—their intensity balances their scarcity—and the reader is left struggling between wanting something to happen (presumably some sign of hope) and dreading whatever might happen next. So few writers can achieve this degree of narrative tension using such minimal style, yet McCarthy has mastered it in devastating fashion.
    • 3/5
      Audiobook performed by Tom Stechschulte.A man and his son wander a desolate and destroyed American landscape after some unnamed world-wide disaster has pretty much killed off most of the earth’s population and destroyed the environment. Neither character is ever named, though the boy does call the man “Papa.” I did rather like the relationship between these two central figures. How the father tried to explain and instruct his son, to impart some life skills that might help the boy in the future, and the efforts he made to provide some measure of safety and well-being for the boy. But this is a pretty bleak landscape and it’s hard to imagine any sort of “happy” (or even hopeful) ending.I don’t need such an ending in order to appreciate and like a book. But I do need to feel some sense of purpose to the story, and I couldn’t figure out what McCarthy was trying to impart. Is this a cautionary tale about man’s inhumanity to man? Or a warning of environmental disaster? Is it simply a story of parental love?And there were things that I found inconsistent. Maybe it’s because McCarthy never explains what happened, but how can the world be nothing but ash and burned cities, and there still be apples in an orchard? How come some houses are still standing, virtually pristine (except for the layers of dust)? And then there’s the ending itself. I don’t want to give anything away, but it just left me shaking my head and wondering “what the hell?” Still, there is something about McCarthy’s writing that captivates me. I like his spare style. I like the way he paints the landscape so that I feel I am living in the novel (even if it’s a horrible place to be). I think he’s one of those author’s whose works I appreciate, even when I don’t particularly like them.I listened to the audiobook, performed by Tom Stechschulte. Stechschulte is a talented voice artist and actor and he really brings these characters to life. 5***** for his performance.
    • 4/5
      You die inside, but you persevere. Will certainly read more from McCarthy. [
    • 3/5
      After 3 false starts with this book, I finally managed to finish it. It took me a while to get over McCarthy's writing style, and I'm still not a fan of it. I generally like dystopian fiction, and this was okay as far as that goes, but it certainly isn't the best dystopian novel ever written. At times, I found myself counting backwards from the last page to see how many pages I had left to read, but in the end, the book turned out to be just interesting enough to finish. The ending, however, was slightly weak, in my opinion. I hesitated to give it 3 stars, but I went ahead and did it since I did enjoy the book at times.
    • 2/5
      I wanted to like this book, but left feeling disappointed. The post-apocalyptic landscape is never explained. The reader spends the entire book trying to put together a puzzle with half the pieces missing and many more pieces simply blacked out. The story-telling is detail-heavy to the point of being onerous. You know more about what the snow feels like and how the water in a lake smells than you do about why everyone is dead and how things have shaken out. To me, the single most fascinating part of the post-apocalyptic genre is the question of how mankind will reform an reinvent itself. How the lack of established law and order brings about a new system and who ends up running that system. How quickly we adopt the tribal policies and practices of a bygone era. This book addresses none of those questions. The omission of so many critical details to help you understand what the characters are feeling and thinking, combined with the excess of sensory descriptions, made this an unsatisfying read that left me feeling empty and frustrated at all parts. The one redeeming aspect of the book is the manner in which it addressed the humanity of the characters. The instincts to fight or run, the will to live or the lack thereof. The sting of loss and the challenge of holding on to hope. Those things are explored in a manner which wants to make you think, but the lack of broader context makes it a missed opportunity overall.
    • 3/5
      I waffled between 2* and 4* so that my 3* rating may be misleading. McCarthy did a marvelous job creating a dystopian world (worthy of 4*) despite the fact that I didn't care for the way the book was written (2*).
    • 4/5
      Wow. The Road is terrifying and powerful and one of the saddest books I've ever read. I think it's burned into my memory forever.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written bleak tale of a man and his son travelling in a post apocalyptic world. the language and emotion in the writing is excellent but what remains with me after reading is what is not said by the author - the back story of the characters is never fleshed out nor is the circumstanes of the apocolypse.
    • 4/5
      This is a bleak tale of father and son wading through the ash of an unspecified apocalypse, trying to survive. It's really depressing and almost painful to read at times, but also beautiful: the descriptions of scenery are lyrical, the love of father for son is poignant and the desire to be "good guys" instead of succumbing to the horrible acts other humans are engaging in and this young boy is forced to witness.One thing I don't get: If there aren't any trees or vegetation still alive, and haven't been for a decade or so, how are they breathing?
    • 4/5
      So this book is really freaking depressing and I didn't like the ending. It left me feeling unsatisfied which is why I gave it 4 stars.
    • 4/5
      I was surprised that I liked this as much as I did. I'd been avoiding reading it because of the seemingly depressing storyline, but the real story is that of the father/son relationship, which is very loving and extremely hopeful. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      Reading The Road is certainly one of my literary highlights in all my years as a bibliophile. The sparsity of its world is mirrored in the prose and pulls you in deeper the further you read. The dialog between the two main characters is phenomenally strong and manages to convey how 'the man' or father is struggling to look after and protect his son in the remains of a world we once all knew and how his son is trying to find something to hold onto his innocence when everyone around him seems to be 'the bad people'.

      It manages to hit all the emotional points and leaves you with an immense sense of hope. The ending is probably one of the best I've read in a long time and even though part of you knows what will eventually happen at the end of the story you still are emotionally drained after reading it.

      I can't think of a better book to recommend to friends and fmaily and anyone who wants to lose themselves in a wonderful world and story.
    • 4/5
      A disturbing, bleak, portrait of post apocalyptic America populated by two main characters, father and son, as they traverse a nightmare landscape. I haven't been able to read many books from cover to cover during the last few years as I usually sample chapters to develop a taste for the author's voice, but this novel was the exception. I was drawn in to the story by these two character's and their struggle to survive. It's not your typical post apocalyptic story line. The father's interior monologue drives the story and demonstrates the unflagging affection he possesses for his child and his need to deliver them from the chaos that surrounds them. Their ordeal serves to underscore the depth of their bond and to what extent a father will fight a hostile world. Despite the unrelenting dark atmosphere of the story, these characters form a luminous synergy, in which without the other, neither individual spirit could survive this road to perdition.
    • 5/5
      I read this before Oprah "discovered" it and before it won the Pulitzer. It's one of the bleakest and most beautifully written novels I have ever read.
    • 4/5
      A father and son wanders in a post-apocalyptic landscape, trying to reach warmer climates without falling prey to scavengers. This is extremely harsh and bleak, but strangely loving at the same time. The language is very evocative, almost hypnotic at times, and the dread the pair feels is almost tangible. Haunting might be the right word to decribe it, since the images of the boy and the man will stay on in the readers mind long after the book is finished.
    • 5/5
      This book felt like the post-apocalyptic books of the 50s and 60s that scared the be-jesus out of me when I was in high school. I was actually surprised to see that it was written in 2006, as it feels a generation older than that. Good thing I read this during the day, not while trying to fall asleep at night!The lack of punctuation and the spareness of the language drive the book forward. I felt almost forced to read quickly, while at the same time, dreading what might be coming on the next page. The unmitigated gray and cold weighed it down, denying any possibility of hope. Yet, the relationship of father and son stands out against the hopelessness.
    • 5/5
      In this incredibly sad, moving and yet somehow uplifting story a boy wandering with his father through the ruins of the post-apocalyptic civilisation. It's hard to find any positive things in the book unless the boy's innate and stubborn goodness and humanism. I've never read a book so gray before...
    • 5/5
      McCarthy's new classic of American literature is a poignant exploration of love and fatherhood set against a post-apocalyptic backdrop. It examines human nature, society, religion, and hope. The book is bleak and dystopic, cryptic yet evident. A powerful novel delivered by a master.
    • 3/5
      This is a short book, written in typical McCarthy style, yet its not a particularly pleasing book and in places its a positively depressing read! Sad after such a great run of really great books by the same author