Literary Fiction · DarkA father and his young son walk south across a burned America with a pistol
The Road
A father and his young son walk through a burned world with nothing but each other
A father and his son travel alone through a burned America where ash drifts on the wind, the cold is severe and the sky stays dark. They are heading for the coast without knowing what awaits them. All they have is a pistol, the clothes they wear, a cart of scavenged food, and each other. McCarthy's novel follows them through a future with no hope, in which their love for each other is the only thing that keeps them going.
More about this book
Who
A father and his young son, walking together. The father has a cough, and the two carry what little they own in knapsacks and a supermarket cart. The father tells the boy that they are the good guys.
World
An ash-covered United States, some years after an unexplained catastrophe killed almost all life on Earth. The pair follow county roads toward the sea, and their journey lasts several months.
What makes it different
The book never names or explains the disaster. Everything is seen through the daily business of survival: scavenged food, the cold, and the road itself.
Feel
Post-apocalyptic fiction and tragedy, written in spare prose. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was made into a film in 2009 with Viggo Mortensen.
Page count and cover shown for: Hardcover, first edition
Behind the book
The idea came in 2003, on a visit to El Paso, Texas, with his young son: McCarthy imagined the city decades in the future, with fires on the hill. He jotted a few notes and came back to it years later, when the novel arrived quickly, in about six weeks. It is dedicated to his son John.
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- The Road: background and receptionWikipedia
- 7 facts about The RoadMental Floss