Maybe you stumbled upon The Road because you're into the post-apocalyptic scene – you have a soft spot for Mad Max and Terminator movies, or found yourself enjoying Children of Men, 28 Days Later, and The Book of Eli. Or maybe you've read some of Cormac McCarthy's novels before. Either way, you're in for a treat with The Road.

Not only did The Road – a book about and a father and son traversing a post-apocalyptic landscape – win Cormac McCarthy the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for literature, but The Times named it the best book of the decade. The attention didn't end there. Literary critics have lavished praise on the novel, and Oprah Winfrey (yes, the Oprah) even interviewed Cormac McCarthy for her show. It's impossible to say for sure whether any novel will become an American classic, but The Road seems like a good bet.

Was McCarthy just twiddling his thumbs before The Road? Not exactly. He's been writing a string of well-received novels since the 1960s, including Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and No Country for Old Men. In a 2003 article, the big-time (and highly picky) critic Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian "worthy of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick" and named McCarthy one of the great living American novelists (source).

McCarthy's work has even made it to the big screen. The Coen brothers made his 2005 novel, No Country for Old Men, into a film of the same title, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2008. And you may have first heard of The Road from the 2009 movie starring Viggo Mortensen (of Aragorn fame).

When The Road appeared on bookstands in 2006, critics noted the book's (expected) brutality and its (unexpected) tenderness (source). The Road simultaneously advanced McCarthy's reputation for violent, brutal writing and introduced a new depth of compassion.

Yvonne Zipp wrote the following about The Road in her Christian Science Monitor review:

The love between the father and the son is one of the most profound relationships McCarthy has ever written, and the strength of it helps raise the novel – despite considerable gore – above nihilistic horror. (source)

To sum up: this is a novel by an American master. It has all the thrills you'd expect from a post-apocalyptic novel, a fair share of horror and gore, and you'll also encounter an incredibly sweet relationship between a father and son.