The Road

A father and his young son walk a road through the ruins of America. An unnamed catastrophe has burned the world to ash: no animals, no crops, a sky the color of slate, and the few survivors reduced to scavenging or worse. The two push a shopping cart of salvaged belongings south toward the coast, hoping the warmth will keep them alive through another winter.

Cormac McCarthy strips his prose to the bone — spare, unpunctuated, almost biblical — to tell a story that is at once brutally bleak and unbearably tender. The man's single purpose is to keep the boy alive and to keep him good, teaching him that they are "the good guys" who "carry the fire" in a world where nearly everyone else has surrendered their humanity.

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, The Road is a devastating meditation on love, survival, and what remains of morality when civilization is gone. It is short, harrowing, and impossible to forget.