The Road - Tapa blanda

Mesmerising... The best novel I read last year was McCarthy's No County for Old Men. I shall be astonished if this year I read anything better than The Road. --Mail on Sunday

A father and his son walk alone through burned America, heading through the ravaged landscape to the coast. This is the profoundly moving story of their journey. The Road boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which two people, `each the other's world entire', are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. `The first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation. Here is an American classic which, at a stroke, makes McCarthy a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature . . . An absolutely wonderful book that people will be reading for generations' Andrew O'Hagan `A work of such terrible beauty that you will struggle to look away' Tom Gatti, The Times `So good that it will devour you, in parts. It is incandescent' Niall Griffiths, Daily Telegraph `You will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled, mesmerised. All the modern novel can do is done here' Alan Warner, Guardian