The Road is a novel set in a burned and ashen America after an unexplained catastrophe has destroyed most life. A father and his young son travel on foot toward the coast, pushing a cart of scavenged belongings and trying to avoid starving and the dangerous people they meet. The book is spare and quiet, and its focus is the bond between the two, the small acts of care that continue in a ruined world, and the question of what it means to stay decent when everything else is lost. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Quotes
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.
He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.
He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.You forget some things, don't you?Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond fell away on every side. It's snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.