The Road

Author: Cormac Mccarthy

We never know exactly what has happened, an apocalypse of some kind that has covered the landscape with ash and destroyed all animal life, but which has left most houses intact. There are human survivors, grubby, ragged, scrounging for what they can get from the houses they come across, or reverting to cannibalism.Two such survivors are a father and his son, heading south to avoid the coming winter with all their meagre possessions bundled into a shopping trolley. They survive attacks, avoid cannibals, lose most of what they have, then discover a secret cache of food that keeps them going. The father is dying, he thinks about nothing now but keeping his son alive. We are the good guys, he tells him, we keep the flame.The prose is spare, the story bleak and harrowing, but with the slightest hint of salvation at the end. It is a haunting, terrifying, magnificent book that will keep you up nights. The Road won a host of mainstream literary prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, yet it also received near universal praise within the science fiction community.

Similar Recommendations

The picture that The Road paints is harsh and unsparing, and there are some few other accounts of our doom that have the same effect.

Golden Days by Carolyn See is a novel about the lives of a group of comfortably off women on the fringes of medialand in contemporary Los Angeles. But off stage, crises lead to World War Three, and the glamorous life is suddenly torn apart by nuclear devastation. What follows is a bleak, uncompromising account of the aches and sickness and hunger and horror of the few people struggling to survive, with prospects every bit as dismal as those in The Road.

This is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow imagines that the few survivors fleeing from World War Three are put on trial by those souls who would never be born because of the nuclear devastation. It proves to be a hauntingly effective way of conveying the anger and the horror of nuclear war.