The Road: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (Picador Classic Book 76)
‘Emotionally shattering … The Road affirms belief in the tender pricelessness of the here and now. In creating an exquisite nightmare, it does not add to the cruelty and ugliness of our times; it warns us now how much we have to lose … Beauty and goodness are here aplenty and we should think about them. While we can’
Alan Warner, Guardian
‘Nameless they remain, but some connective tissue, some deep sympathy, makes them human and knowable to us, causes us to care almost beyond bearing about their fates, and so makes us read on compulsively for fear of what might happen to them. And us’
Clive Sinclair, Independent
‘Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, conjuring up the end not of an individual but of all humanity, feels very real. Part of the achievement of The Road is its poetic description of landscapes from which the possibility of poetry would seem to have been stripped, along with their ability to support life’
Adam Mars-Jones, Observer
‘Such is the rapport between father and son and so effective is McCarthy’s prose that one reads on, terrified that some disaster will befall them. One almost forgets that it already has … More than an allegory or fantasy, The Road is a frighteningly credible novel’
Spectator
‘The Road is the book that lives in the mind … composed in prose that engages all the senses’
Pete Clarke, Evening Standard Books of the Year
‘Mesmerising … remarkable for its acuity, empathy and insight. There are many images in the novel which will haunt you’
Sebastian Shakespeare, Literary Review
‘Utterly compelling, offering glimpses of both the best and the worst of the human condition in its darkest hour’
List
‘There’s always a kind of ecstasy in reading McCarthy, an ecstasy so far beyond words as to make even a qualitative sentence like this one superfluous. But there’s also heartbreak’
Niall Griffiths, Daily Telegraph
‘A spectacular novel … Images continue to recur long after it has been put aside’
Scotland on Sunday
‘A haunting, unsettling book that ideally should be read at one sitting, as long as you are prepared to bear the brunt of its full impact. To do so is to be richly rewarded … The Road is a landmark in depicting the worst – and best – that humanity can muster’
Daily Express
‘McCarthy is a master of American literature and this extraordinarily bleak but breathtakingly brilliant novel is the finest thing he’s ever written … A shocking, yet incredibly moving tale which perfectly examines what lies at the heart of all humanity’
Big Issue
‘McCarthy’s mesmerising novel, slim but fiercely concentrated, is a masterpiece that will soon be considered a classic. Its weight and power are unanswerable. McCarthy knows no way of writing apart from the beautiful’
Herald
‘A gripping, heart-rending human story, which explores the depths of despair and savagery beside the heights of love, tenderness and self-sacrifice. McCarthy has delivered a master stroke: this tale is beautiful, hypnotic, and terrifyingly real’
New Statesman
‘I read The Road in one sitting. It’s terrifying and unflinching and brilliant’
Nick Laird, Guardian Books of the Year
‘The searing culmination of his work so far. His spare philosophical prose is as entrancing as ever, as is his inimitable ability to describe violent encounters. It’s a novel of profound seriousness, offered as a gift’
Time Out
‘Cormac McCarthy strips back America – and his style – to a post-apocalyptic core in his biblically resonant tale of family, love and loss’
Boyd Tonkin, Independent Books of the Year
‘Dazzling and beautiful and moving and sad … an amazing, amazing book’
Ekow Eshun, BBC Radio 4
‘The Road is about tenderness despite everything. McCarthy has unmade the world, but against all the odds, this novel holds out a thin strand of hope: for the power of language and storytelling even at the end of all things’
Financial Times
‘The prose is of such beauty and stark restraint, it reads like a prophetic lament. An extraordinary tale of humanity in ruins – one we should all read’
Daily Mail
‘Trenchant and terrifying, written with stripped-down urgency and fuelled by the force of a universal nightmare … This is art that both frightens and inspires’
New York Times
‘A brutal, beautiful culmination of the themes that have haunted his previous fiction … The most tender, saddest story McCarthy has ever written’
Metro
‘No novelist working today is better suited to chronicle the end of the world than Cormac McCarthy … What really elevates the novel from its slough of despond is the sheer, terrible beauty of the writing’
Stephen Amidon, Sunday Times
‘We are watching a late flowering of a great American novelist. For all its grim imaginings, The Road’s divine language carries its two entwined souls above the darkness. McCarthy continues to carry the fire’
Independent on Sunday
‘Both terrifying and beautiful, it is about us all, about the best and worst of humankind, and it would be impossible to recommend it too highly’
Waterstone’s Books Quarterly