It is rare for a book to make my chest heavy, but The Road by Cormac McCarthy did the job. This book doesn't just break your heart a little but is also horrifying of what the world might look like one day. The Road is considered one of the best works of Cormac McCarthy, and rightly so.
The book follows the tale of a father-son duo as they make their way through the landscapes over several months in the post-apocalypse U.S. They have little to no hope to cling onto and are forced to go through some grueling times together.
The deep-rooted message of the book is the lengths a man would go for his child. It is a thriller that has a slow start but would soon grip you. The book is detailed with the incidents and accidents that they have to face together. The ending of the book, however, is what affected me the most.
There is little to the backstory of how the world came to this dire situation, and the characters remain anonymous. To some, this might be intriguing, while others might find it a little hard to connect with the characters. As for me, I fit in the former.
A few conversations between the man and his son are based on the conversations between Cormac McCarthy and his son John Francis McCarthy. Cormac also dedicated this book to his son as a sign of paternal love.
“In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
Special credits to a cousin of mine who left this book at his parents’ place before going to college, and I could lay my hands on it.