THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a fast read and lives up to the hype as his masterpiece. It's very dark and therefore may not be for everyone. It's a post-apocalypse story with virtually no women characters. Churning up memories of Stephen King's The Stand, it also shares some themes with the Mad Max movies and Will Smith's current I Am Legend, based on the Richard Matheson book, but its imagery is more effective than any of these. It's a very emotional story about a father and son in the bleakest of circumstances, and I highly recommend it. You'll have a lot of questions about what actually happened, but that's the author's way, I guess, of saying that it doesn't really matter, because it's not about how we got here. The form of the novel reflects the unstructured world being described, in that there are no chapter breaks. Not all complete sentences either (like this one). It won the 2007 Pulitzer for fiction. Don't miss it.

Cormac McCarthy also wrote All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, plus about 8 other novels.