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Books » Fiction & Literature » General
The Road
http://www.fishpond.com.au/Books/Road-Cormac-McCarthy/9780330447546
By
Cormac McCarthy
| Rating: | | | Format: | Paperback, 256 pages | | Release Date: | 01 June 2007 | A father and his son walk alone through burned America, heading through the ravaged landscape to the coast. This is the profoundly moving story of their journey. "The Road" boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which two people, 'each the other's world entire', are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. 'The first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation. Here is an American classic which, at a stroke, makes McCarthy a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature ...An absolutely wonderful book that people will be reading for generations' - Andrew O'Hagan. 'A work of such terrible beauty that you will struggle to look away' - Tom Gatti, "The Times". 'So good that it will devour you, in parts. It is incandescent' - Niall Griffiths, "Daily Telegraph". 'You will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled, mesmerised. All the modern novel can do is done here' - Alan Warner, "Guardian". About the AuthorCormac McCarthy is the author of nine previous novels, and among his honours are the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. ReviewsNew territory for McCarthy: a postapocalyptic landscape where readers meet a man who recalls a better world and a boy who doesn't. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information. Violence, in McCarthy's postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. (The man's wife, who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. Beyond the ever-present possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic thugs. The man assures the boy that the two of them are "good guys," but from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out. 250,000 announced first printing; BOMC main selection. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information. |
| Publisher: | Picador | | ISBN: | 0330447548 |
| EAN: | 9780330447546 | | Dimensions: | 19.0 x 13.0 centimeters |
| Age Range: |
15+ years |
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Reviews
5.0
out of 5 based on
6
reviews.
 – Customer review on 25/09/2009
A wholly unique look at 'the day after that day'. The prose is beautifully crafted, the man and boy so sparingly described yet so vividly seared into a reader's mind is only eclipsed by the events they experience.
Each set-piece is haunting in their own way, however are all entirely believable- every foul vagrant, each naked amputee a victim of society denigrating into ruin.
Not preachy, but questioning, not heavy, but involving.
Can't recommend it enough!
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5.0
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– Customer review on 29/01/2009
Brilliant... Cormac McCrathy writes beautifully... the story of a father and son walking the road in a post-apocalyptic America, where bands of marauders rape and cannibalise, and the father seeks to reach the coast, living for his son, "each the other's world entire"... very hard to put down... touching, poignant, terrifying,challenging... winner of the Pullitzer Prize 2007.
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5.0
out of 5 based on
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– Customer review on 12/04/2010
This book is a stark, dark and very moving picture of post apocolyptic America and by proxy the rest of the Western World. Two people, a father and son, struggle to stay alive and retain their humanity in a journey which leads, eventually, nowhere. The image of the two survivors pushing a shopping cart through a wasteland is a little too much like parts of everyday life of shopping malls and supermarkets to be comfortable.
The writing is superb putting dark places in your mind as you read, all the while retaining and explaining the essential love between people. I read this book in one sitting and could not put it down. When I finished it was night and I struggled to step out into the dark for fear of how close the novel's blackness, that the author simply captures, actually is to everyday life. In all of the darkness the story is about love and hope. I recommend this book to everyone. Here is to the good guys.
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5.0
out of 5 based on
6
reviews.
– Customer review on 26/03/2010
An amazing book, absolutely breathtaking in its scope and the grim images it conveys. It's at once terrifying and uplifting, a testament to destruction and the total love that is possible, a love which endures despite the wreakage of their lives and times. I loved every carefully crafted passage, even those that I had to hold my breath to read due to the horrifying unfolding of the tale. All that a novel can be and so much more.
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5.0
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– Customer review on 25/01/2010
Best Book of the last Decade.
So bleak yet so beautiful at the same the time. McCarthy ky captures the Post Apocalyptic scenario in text form.
A must read.
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5.0
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6
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– Customer review on 01/11/2009
This perhaps one of the most haunting books I have ever read, unable to put it down and unable to stop thinking about it long after I had finished.
McCarthy's writing is beautiful and is exceptionally vivid, drawing the reader into the story and into the lives of the man and boy. The story is bleak, yet, you find yourself always searching for hope as you follow the journey of the man and his son through desperation and devotion to one another.
I was utterly captivated by this book.
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