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)

professional vivid narration.

Loved to listen. the narrator was great. however the story was good,but not the best of its kind. liked the "one second after" more.

Poetic but dark

The author writes with such a poetic style that this book is really interesting to listen to. The story is dark so it may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Narration was excellent.

Great Beauty and Great Sadness

Most audiobooks I'm impatient to get through, and listen to at 1.5x speed. Other books are so dense with emotion and prose, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance, that I listen to them at 0.8x speed. This was one of the latter. One of the saddest things I've ever read. The sense of desolation and hopeless is palpable.

phenomenal !

all except maybe a slightly jaded view of God, considering the circumstances , is worth a credit. stupendously written and performed !!

A sad post apocalyptic story

A very sad but seemingly realistic portrayal of near term post apocalyptic events immediately after

Phenomenal narration

Gripping story but most of all marvelously narrated. An excellent choice of narrator for this book, that made me finish the book in a single sweep

Okay... Without action

It's well narrated, but it's super slow and without events. It's a boy and his father scared and hopeless (or nearly). For the entire book.

the road

perfect narrator, great story. Very hard to put this book down. A must read so one for the bucket list

This is a great story.

The Road is a story with a dark tone, so be mindful of that if you are considering it for a listen. The entire listen is somewhere around 3-4 hours long, so it can be finished in a morning or evening. It's packed with a lot of content that I felt gave the story a depth that felt longer than it's length. After reading it, I felt that it deserved the Pulitzer Prize.

One of the best books ever

This is one of the most greedy, most harsh books I have ever read. It is beautifully written and extremely well narrated. McCarthy paint such an expensive waste land, shows the breakdown of one’s psyche when they are put to the test in this case, survival. I love every book of Mr. McCarthy‘s but this song is by far my favorite