The Road
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
★ 4.00 from 1.1m ratings on Goodreads
Science fiction HorrorLiterary fiction
A father and son walk south through a burned America with a shopping cart, a pistol and the rule to keep going. A spare, gray walk through dread and tenderness, slow and repetitive, with a father's love pressing against grief.
Feels like dread, tenderness and grief. About family, society and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want a quiet, harrowing story about a parent and child surviving together. Be warned that the relentless bleakness and repeated details can feel tedious, as some readers find.
Why read it
It offers a stark, intimate look at love and endurance when the world has gone gray, and it stays with you through its restraint.
A page from the book
Whatever light is left in the world is sleeping beside him.
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. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. What readers say
Readers describe the book as emotionally devastating and frightening, with many moved by the father-son bond and faint hope. Others find the repetition and relentless bleakness tedious or frustrating.
Cormac McCarthy.McCarthy wrote The Road in his seventies, after becoming a father again; he dedicated it to his son John Francis, born in 1999.
Books that feel like this
More by Cormac McCarthy
Σάτρι
Cormac McCarthy, 1965
A river town, a fisherman, and a figure called the satyr: McCarthy's first novel, a dark, lyrical drift through water, poverty and the grotesque.
Yol
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
A father and his son walk south through a burned America, carrying a pistol and a fire that has to mean something. Spare, terrifying, tender.
Ο δρόμος
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
A father and son cross a devastated world, carrying the fragile work of staying alive—and of remaining human.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Road for me?
- You may like it if you want a quiet, harrowing story about a parent and child surviving together. Be warned that the relentless bleakness and repeated details can feel tedious, as some readers find.
- What is The Road like?
- A spare, gray walk through dread and tenderness, slow and repetitive, with a father's love pressing against grief. Feels like dread, tenderness and grief. About family, society and memory.
- What should I read after The Road?
- If you liked The Road, try Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), Mad Honey (Jodi Picoult) and The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold).
A taste of the feed
What it costs to keep believing in a piece of land you'll never own.
They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head.
Of Mice and Men · John Steinbeck
The vertigo of noticing, mid-breakfast, that your child is grown.
For a moment, I let myself stare at him. It’s hard to believe that the soft-centered little boy who would cry when his hands got sticky with propolis from the hives can now lift a super full of forty pounds of honey as if it weighs no more than his hockey stick. Asher is over six feet tall, but even as he was growing, he was never ungainly. He moves with the kind of grace you find in wildcats, the ones that can steal away a kitten or a chick before you even realize they’ve gone. Asher has my blond hair and the same ghost-green eyes, for which I have always been grateful.
Mad Honey · Jodi Picoult
What a child sees in a snow globe, and what her father answers.
Inside the snow globe on my father’s desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was alone in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said, "Don’t worry, Susie; he has a nice life. He’s trapped in a perfect world.
The Lovely Bones · Alice Sebold
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