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The Best Fiction Books

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
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The Road

by Cormac McCarthy

🏆 Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

Recommendations from our site

“I first read it as a student, and I remember finishing this book while I was sitting on a train and weeping, and people looking at me, wondering if I was going through some kind of crisis. It was the first time I’d ever just wept at a book. It’s a strange feeling. And it made me think: this is what literature can do. This is the power it has.” Read more...

The best books on The End of the World

Paul Cooper, Historian

“The Road is a very spare novel by Cormac McCarthy. Humanity has been wiped out, for the most part. There’s a man and his son traveling on a road to try to get to where it’s rumored that sprouts of civilization are starting to grow again. It’s a very minimalistic book. It’s very sparse and elegiac, just with those two characters.” Read more...

The Best Apocalyptic Fiction

Elliot Ackerman, Military Historians & Veteran

” I think it’s probably his happiest book. Which is a little weird to say but it does have the most sincere and overt love relationship of all of his works, between the father and the son. It’s very purely represented. You can’t doubt the importance of that love and the sustained power of it, and its priority both for the characters and the premise of the book as a whole.” Read more...

The Best Cormac McCarthy Books

Stacey Peebles, Literary Scholar

“In my view, The Road is the greatest novel ever written, and McCarthy one of the most important writers of the last hundred years. Its bleakness is interspersed with sentences so beautiful I wept.” Read more...

The best books on Wilderness

Mark Boyle, Environmentalist

“There is no creature that has been transformed by leaking chemicals or radioactive satellites. But, on the other hand, there are human beings who consume other humans and that informs the major conflicts of the book. So, you’ve got a post-apocalyptic setting and you’ve got ethical quandaries for the main characters. There’s the sense of menace that permeates the zombie apocalypse. It’s not bad enough that they’re going to kill you, they’re also going to eat you. What I love about this story is its literary quality. We tend to think of the zombie apocalypse as a low-culture, pulp phenomenon.” Read more...

The best books on Zombies

Greg Garrett, Literary Scholar

“This is possibly the most important environmental book ever written. It is a thought-experiment that imagines the world without a biosphere. That is the fundamental thought-experiment at the heart of environmentalism. All the horrors of that story arise from the disappearance of the biosphere, leaving people without any means of feeding themselves and without any means of survival. They are thrown into a brutal and fatal competition where the only thing left to eat is each other.” Read more...

George Monbiot — with An Essential Reading List

George Monbiot, Environmentalist

“It is such a powerful story … against an utterly bleak scenario you have the father and the son, and the novel builds up this incredibly emotive relationship….the love the father has for the son and the son’s innate humanity are the two glimmers of hope which endure through the book. It is one of those devastating books which by the time you finish it leaves you numb and changed.” Read more...

The Best Apocalyptic Novels

James Miller, Literary Scholar

Other books by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger & Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger & Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

Child of God
by Cormac McCarthy

Our most recommended books

  • Middlemarch
    by George Eliot

  • Dracula
    by Bram Stoker

  • Jane Eyre
    by Charlotte Brontë

  • James: A Novel
    by Percival Everett

  • Beloved
    by Toni Morrison

  • Frankenstein (Book)
    by Mary Shelley

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