The Road

The Road is a novel by the American writer Cormac McCarthy, published in 2006, following an unnamed father and his young son as they walk south along a highway across a devastated American landscape years after an unspecified cataclysm has destroyed most life on Earth. Pushing their few possessions in a shopping cart and constantly on guard against starvation, cold and the roaming bands of cannibalistic survivors who prey on the weak, the father devotes himself entirely to protecting his son and to teaching him to distinguish between the good guys, those who retain some shred of morality, and the bad, while privately concealing a pistol with two bullets meant to spare them both a worse fate if they are caught. Written in McCarthy's characteristically spare prose, largely stripped of quotation marks and extended description, the novel builds its emotional force through the father's exhausted tenderness toward his son rather than through incident, and it ends with the father's death from illness and the boy's uncertain rescue by another family. The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and it is widely regarded as one of the most powerful works of post-apocalyptic fiction for its focus on parental love and moral endurance rather than survivalist spectacle.