#14 in Dystopian
The Road
- 256
- Pages
- about 4.5 h
- Reading time
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize
- Tähtivaeltaja Award
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
- Oprah's Book Club
- Believer Book Award
- Ignotus Award for Best Foreign Novel
- NPR Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
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Our view
Few novels are this bleak. A father and his boy cross a ruined land, and McCarthy leaves them almost nothing to hope for. What holds the book together is the bond between the two, and it is deeply moving; some readers finish it thinking about the kind of parent they want to be. It is short but heavy, and not the book for a week when you need comfort.
Worth knowing Cormac McCarthy dedicated it to his son John, and said it grew from a night in an El Paso hotel, looking out at the town with the boy asleep and imagining it fifty or a hundred years on. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, and Oprah Winfrey’s choice of it for her book club brought McCarthy’s first television interview. The prose has no quotation marks and almost no names. John Hillcoat filmed it in 2009 with Viggo Mortensen.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. The book details the grueling journey of a father and his young son over several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilization and nearly all life. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. The book was adapted into a film of the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat, and a comic book in 2024, illustrated by Manu Larcenet.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.0 across 2,774 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 95% of the weight and the score stays at 8.1 — the Dystopian average of 7.7 barely moves it. A further +0.10 comes from the small bonus for major awards.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.8 | 175 | 6% |
| Hardcover | 8.0 | 2.6K | 94% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Road?
It has 256 pages — shorter than 81% of the ranked books in Dystopian.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Dystopian — with scores between 7.9 and 8.4, closest to this book.
