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Award Winning Books

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Why The Road Captures Readers And Sometimes Consumes Them

And The Pulitzer Prize for distinguished fiction by an American author goes to The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Cormac McCarthy reaches for his brush and paints a dark picture in his 2007 novel The Road . He uses a very limited color palette of black and grey in this story. Even with such a limited range of color, character and story background, the novel forcefully submerges the reader into the dark and cold world.

Why does it work? Because McCarthy successfully crafts a rich and vivid dream that plays in the reader's mind.

McCarthy applies just enough description to jump-start the reader's imagnation. The imagnation quickly fills in the gaps in the story backgound (e.g., what caused the landscape to be blackened and covered with grey ash). We read on, or more precisely dream on actively worrying about the choices the father and son make in their journey to survive. In first-class fiction such as The Road, the dream engages us fully - heart and soul.

Reading this novel, you'll listen in panic along with the father and son as they attempt to avoid being captured by starved and desperate survivors. You'll respond to their fictional problems as if they were real. You'll sympathize; feel their hunger, get cold, stumble after hours of walking without food, and sometimes sense that death is near.

Even after putting down this book, the story lingers like a dream. The Road is the result of a great writer, working at the height of his craft.

Book Reviews

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Award Winning Books

Why The Road Captures Readers And Sometimes Consumes Them

Book Reviews

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