Summary and Reviews of The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road

by Cormac McCarthy
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (9):
  • Readers' Rating (19):
  • First Published:
  • Sep 26, 2006, 256 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Mar 2007, 304 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A searing, postapocalyptic novel by the author of the much loved Border Trilogy.

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.

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  • award image

    Pulitzer Prize
    2007

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

As a prophetic vision of the end times, McCarthy's interpretation would leave the fire and brimstone prophets of old quaking in their sandals. As a parable or allegory, The Road offers rich veins of interpretation, precisely because it lacks a clear message, leaving it up to the reader to interpret it as they see fit...continued

Full Review (931 words)

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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).

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Beyond the Book



Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He attended the University of Tennessee in the early 1950s, and joined the U.S. Air Force, serving four years, two of them stationed in Alaska. McCarthy then returned to the university, where he published in the student literary magazine and won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. McCarthy next went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, published in 1965.

Outer Dark was published in1968, followed by Child of God in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977.

In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and ...

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Read-Alikes

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Who Said...

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins

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