The Road - Hardcover

Cormac McCarthy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0330509012 ISBN 13: 9780330509015

Publisher: Picador, 2009

Synopsis

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Picador is producing a beautiful new hardback edition of a book that is viewed by many as the most extraordinarily written book of the last ten years, and whose author is consistently touted to win the Nobel Prize. Publication will follow the release of what will be a hugely acclaimed film starring Viggo Mortensen (Lord of the Rings) and Academy Award winner Charlize Theron. 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. '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 '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 this title

Review

Best known for his Border Trilogy, hailed in the San Francisco Chronicle as "an American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century," Cormac McCarthy has written ten rich and often brutal novels, including the bestselling No Country for Old Men, and The Road. Profoundly dark, told in spare, searing prose, The Road is a post-apocalyptic masterpiece, one of the best books we've read this year, but in case you need a second (and expert) opinion, we asked Dennis Lehane, author of equally rich, occasionally bleak and brutal novels, to read it and give us his take. Read his glowing review below. --Daphne Durham

Guest Reviewer: Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane, master of the hard-boiled thriller, generated a cult following with his series about private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, wowed readers with the intense and gut-wrenching Mystic River, blew fans all away with the mind-bending Shutter Island, and switches gears with Coronado, his new collection of gritty short stories (and one play).

Cormac McCarthy sets his new novel, The Road, in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment with pieces of human flesh stuck between their teeth. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. McCarthy may have just set to paper the definitive vision of the world after nuclear war, and in this recent age of relentless saber-rattling by the global powers, it's not much of a leap to feel his vision could be not far off the mark nor, sadly, right around the corner. Stealing across this horrific (and that's the only word for it) landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that could surprise readers of McCarthy's previous work. McCarthy's Gnostic impressions of mankind have left very little place for love. In fact that greatest love affair in any of his novels, I would argue, occurs between the Billy Parham and the wolf in The Crossing. But here the love of a desperate father for his sickly son transcends all else. McCarthy has always written about the battle between light and darkness; the darkness usually comprises 99.9% of the world, while any illumination is the weak shaft thrown by a penlight running low on batteries. In The Road, those batteries are almost out--the entire world is, quite literally, dying--so the final affirmation of hope in the novel's closing pages is all the more shocking and maybe all the more enduring as the boy takes all of his father's (and McCarthy's) rage at the hopeless folly of man and lays it down, lifting up, in its place, the oddest of all things: faith. --Dennis Lehane

From the Publisher

**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
**New film starring Vigo Mortensen in theaters November 2008
**Oprah Book Club pick

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0330509012
• ISBN 13: 9780330509015
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256