The Road

By: Cormac McCarthy

Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte

Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins

Publisher's summary

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2007

America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst this destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still, they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world of utter devastation.

Bleak but brilliant, with glimmers of hope and humor, The Road is a stunning allegory and perhaps Cormac McCarthy's finest novel to date. This remarkable departure from his previous works has been hailed by Kirkus Reviews as a "novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth".

McCarthy, a New York Times best-selling author, is a past recipient of the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. He is widely considered one of America's greatest writers.

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Critic reviews

"McCarthy's prose retains its ability to seduce...and there are nods to the gentler aspects of the human spirit." (The New Yorker)
"One of McCarthy's best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal...Every moment of The Road is rich with dilemmas that are as shattering as they are unspoken...McCarthy is so accomplished that the reader senses the mysterious and intuitive changes between father and son that can't be articulated, let alone dramatized...Both lyric and savage, both desperate and transcendent, although transcendence is singed around the edges...Tag McCarthy one of the four or five great American novelists of his generation." (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Deeply Unsettling

A friend asked me to describe this book, and I had a hard time doing so, honestly. Ultimately what I said was this, and I think it fits darn well, quite frankly:

"You know when you're sitting at home, minding your own business, and all of a sudden, you see a large spider out of the corner of your eye? You get up and launch a book at it, killing it. And five minutes later, when you've resumed minding your own business, you can't help but glance back over into that exact same spot every 90 seconds for the remainder of the night - as if that spider is going to come back for revenge, or it's buddies are going to come looking for him and stage an assault. Well - the entire book feels like THAT."

I hope that makes sense. I promise - it will after you read The Road.

Makes you think

Started the book being entertained and ended 'thinking' - it really puts you inside the feeling of what the father and son were experiencing, and makes you value what you have. Excellent listen!

Difficult

This was a difficult book to listen to. It was just so bleak, which of course was the point. I find the images in this book haunting me even now, a year after listening to it. When I think back, it was an amazing book to have affected me so profoundly without even having realized it at the time.

dark and thoughtful

It was a book I could not put down, but there were times when I wanted to because it made an ugly future so real.

intellectual prose art

I opted to download this book because it's been so talked about and good enough to be made into a movie. I also like post-appocolypse stories -- not love them, but like them. I expected a road of challenges and horrors, and it had that, but the horrors were mental/emotional and the challenges were the same all through the book: stay away from bad guys, watch your back, find food. The story did not have the typical format of building to a climax with an aftermath, which makes it more like real-life being on the road but doesn't make for as exciting reading. It is very much a story about fathers and sons, almost a "coming of age" story for the youngster. This is defintiely not a horror-filled book; definitly not like a Mad Max movie or I Am Lengend. The author is a famous American litterary writer, and everything about the book screams "intellectual" and gives food for thought on everything from writing style to deeper meaning to a debatable ending that would give a literature class several hours of discussion. That is not a bad thing, but important to know. It is a work of prose-art. The reason I gave it only 3 stars is that I only loved it after I went and read more about the author and combed the internet for the questions I had. The narrator was superb in getting the tone just right, having different voices for different characters (there aren't many) and getting the emotion across. He sounded a bit too old for the part of a father with a kid of about 8 years old though, which was mildly distracting to me.

Overly emotional reading

I cannot say I loved this post-apocalyptic novel, it's too bleak and sad. I downloaded it because of McCarthy's reputation as a great story-teller & it's worth listening to just for the sheer experience of his skill as an author. However, the narrator over-dramatised the father and his son, reading emotions into the story I felt weren't there, and therefore making both characters unlikable. I could not separate the reading from the story. I believe the reading of the story should be almost invisible so one can lose oneself in the story. That never happened. Not for one minute did I feel captured within the story because of the way it was read.

6.5 Hours of EPIC

Fantastic. Simply fantastic. I'm not usually a fan of apocalyptic fiction, mostly because it seems the genre has been really overdone in recent years. The Road, however, reads like the OG of end-of-the-world stories.
Although the plots are very different, the only thing I can really compare it to is Richard Mathison's I Am Legend. The emotional responses generated by these stories are similar in their intensity and subject matter. While listening to The Road, it's impossible not to wonder what you'd do in this or that situation. I was alternatly horrified and touched, and over the course of what is weeks and weeks in the story, but somehow less than 7 hours in audiobook time, I developed as complex and as strong a bond with the main characters of this book as I have with any other in 30 years of reading. Like Mathisons's I Am Legend, the ending is quietly epic, and will leave you thinking, and again, wondering.
Do yourself a favor and give this one a listen. It's a Pulitzer Prize winner for a reason.
Also, the narrator is quite simply the best I've ever heard.

very sad yet important book

For a while I thought that the boy was a made up person in the 'father's' mind. The author takes the well defined theme of a post apocalypse scenario and strips it down to the essentials of a road story of survival. Very well read and it is a beautifully written story. Similar to 'The Passage' in parts, or 'Dies the Fire', and other sci fi novels of the dystopia kind, it focuses on the relationship between father and son.

Perseverence lives on.....

The story is "cold", "grey", and full of "ash", but it is a story of perseverence. In a situation with little to no hope, you find yourself asking the characters why they are continuing. But if you are a parent (or an eternal optimist), you will understand. Despite little knowledge about the situation leading up to the story, you find yourself engrossed in an apocolyptic time that is believeable and convincing. The ending was a bit disappointing to me. If you are interested in this story, may I recommend "A Brief History of the Dead". Enjoy!

Sad, but inspiring.

I loved the book and also the movie. Tom Stechshulte did a wonderful job as well.