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| The Road | 
 enlarge | Author: Cormac Mccarthy
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £2.96
You Save: £5.03 (63%)
New (23) from £2.96
Avg. Customer Rating:  209 reviews
Sales Rank: 193
Media: Paperback
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0330447548
EAN: 9780330447546
ASIN: 0330447548
Publication Date: June 1, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 204 more reviews...
 you, your children, your grandparents should read this. November 17, 2008
This is a chilling look ahead. A brilliant writer. Read this with somebody else in the house and phone access to a therapist. This man is my favourite modern American author.
 Less would have been More November 16, 2008
I am truly surprised by all the positive reviews. I can't agree. The author has done much better in his previous work (The Plains Trilogy). It is extremely repetitive and endless. It could have been a short story, which would have been more effective.
Carry the fire November 13, 2008
I was initially surprised to hear that `The Road`, a novel I had wrongly thought to be about a post-apocalyptic world populated by zombie flesh-eaters, had won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In fact only one-part of my initial prognosis was correct; the novel is centred around a man and his son's quest for survival in an America that has befallen some unspecified environmental or nuclear catastrophe. All animal life has disappeared, including most human life, and ash covers everything. Food is scarce, and the survivors have resorted to murder, theft and in some cases slavery and cannibalism. The man and his boy travel the eponymous `Road' to the coast, a quest without any clear objective bar the possibility of encountering other `good guys', and avoiding the `bad guys' as much as possible. Distinguishing whom is whom, however, is not easy, and the tension created by this is brilliantly rendered. Furthermore, and perhaps even more evocatively, is the way McCarthy depicts the protagonists' struggle against the elements in an unyieldingly huge and savage landscape. Their need to huddle together to sustain warmth in the winter nights is as palpable as their paranoia about getting caught by the `bad guys'.
The Road is ultimately a novel about the depth of a father's love for his son (the novel is dedicated to John Francis McCarthy) and his will to protect him at any cost. Thus, McCarthy reserves some faith in the endurance of the human spirit - referred to on several occasions directly as a "fire" that the protagonist's endeavour to keep burning - despite framing man as culpable for his own catastrophe. It's also a hymn to nature's brutal permanence - there is no suggestion that the world itself is poised to end, just that humanity is on the brink. Not exactly `28 Days Later' then, with much of the threat (flesh-eating paedophiles etc.) more suggestive than explicit, and all the more frightening for it.
Survival - or "issues of life and death", as the author put it in one interview - is a theme in many of McCarthy's books, from the `Border Trilogy` to `No Country for Old Men'. His characters often undergo transformative and transgressive experiences on the margins of civilisation, often pitted against the wilds or manifestations of evil ("the bad guys" again) that seem more spectral, or at least representative, than necessarily `real'. Like his frontier-centred novels, The Road is in deep awe of the American wilderness - it's desolate beauty, it's emptiness. Has a more desolate novel ever been written? I haven't read one. Carry the fire.
 Yes I am. I am the one. November 6, 2008
Most of what needs to be said to prospective readers of this book has probably been said by the reviewers below. But the most affecting aspect for me was definitely the relationship between The Boy and The Man.
For The Man, all that he does is focussed on saving The Boy. Both in a physical sense and in a fighting to maintain a spark of the old world's human decency within his son - to keep him "carrying the fire". But in reality, the fire is burning bright in The Boy in a world where elsewhere it has mostly been firmly extinguished. And in the end, it becomes clear that The Man needed The Boy to save him, and what goodness was left in him, far more.
The best book I've read in a long time.
Gripping November 5, 2008
I really enjoyed this book. As a parent I found the relationship between father and son so poignant and moving - I kept picturing my own son as the character in the book. It is some achievement to write such a gripping story with only 2 characters and also with the absence of a full description of what exactly had happened to the earth and its inhabitants. Some chilling passages too. I would highly recommend it.
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