The Road

The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by the American writer Cormac McCarthy. It details the journey of a father and his young son over several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilisation and nearly all life.

McCarthy's tenth novel, it is described by its publisher as his most harrowing and most personal work. The catastrophe is never explained. The father and son are trying to reach the coast before winter. The world is described through weather rather than explanation: the sky stays covered with dust, the seasons become variations on cold and damp, and the journey is measured out in what can be carried.

The book won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006, and it was adapted into a film directed by John Hillcoat in 2009 and a comic book illustrated by Manu Larcenet in 2024. The mother of the child appears only in recollection, and the novel's structure is a sequence of days on the road rather than a plotted campaign, which is why it is usually read as a literary novel as well as a science fiction one.