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The 2008 Award

The Road

 

The Road

 

 

The Road

by Cormac Mc Carthy

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nominated by:

  • LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library, Tallahassee, USA
  • Cleveland Public Library, USA
  • The Association of Public Libraries, The Hague, The Netherlands
  • Kansas City Public Library, USA
  • Halifax Regional Library, Canada
  • New Hampshire State Library, Concord, USA
  • Waterford County Library, Ireland
  • Edinburgh City Libraries & Information Services, Scotland
  • Pikes Peak Library District, Colorado Springs, USA
  • Lincoln Library, Springfield, USA
  • Houston Public Library, USA
  • Jacksonville Public Library, USA
  • Bibliothèque Municipale de Lille, France
  • Richmond Public Library, USA

Publisher of Nominated Edition:


Picador

ISBN: 9780330447539

Alfred A. Knopf

ISBN: 9780307265432

 

the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors
ABOUT THE BOOK

A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “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.

(From Publisher)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cormac McCarthy is the author of nine previous novels. Among his honors are the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

LIBRARIANS' COMMENTS

Best book in English 2006, best book so far by Cormac Mc Carthy.

This novel is very important. The spare quality of the structure and style matches the subject matter. However it is the focus on the central relationship with gives the reader huge hope for humanity.

Cormac Mc Carthy has produced a powerful vision of the future in this book, This is a disturbing, bleak yet compelling story. A dark masterpiece.

Grim. Spare. Stark. Frightening. Beautiful. One of the most powerful novels of our time, The Road is both indictment of  and testament to our humanity.

In The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s sparse verbiage and rationed discourse perfectly emulate the emaciated environment and society left after Armageddon. Alternately evoking hope and despair, his depiction of both a world that has lost its way, and a father and son who are trying to find their way, will be hard to forget by anyone who reads this novel.

Our committee chose this above all other titles considered as a title of high literary merit.

With phrasing both haunting and precise, this post-apocalyptic novel manages to be bleak, horrifying, and uplifting all at the same time.

In stark, horrifying prose, McCarthy sends his nameless father and son on a journey for survival in an immediately post-apocalyptic United States. Stunning and moving.


Beautifully written book concerning a father and son trying to survive in a devastated land, his language is perfect.

This beautifully written account of a father and sons love for each other in the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon represents hope for humanity

 An epic tale by a master storyteller, a very moving story.

 

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