The Road is a bleak vision of a post-apocalyptic world in which a man and his son are travelling along a road in the hope of finding a better future.

This book has won a lot of awards and has brilliant reviews on the cover. This baffles me. I really really struggled with this book and although it only consists of 306 pages, it took me a month to read because I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up again.

I really like this kind of bleak dystopian style fiction usually but McCarthy’s story is particularly depressing. I think what troubled me is the lack of hope in the novel, I didn’t find myself rooting for the man or his son. There’s not enough explanation to make you care about the characters. I don’t know why there’s not more information and why other people haven’t had this issue but this is my main problem with The Road.

I was waiting for something to improve or for the story to develop but the end is just as unsatisfying. A very strange read.

Rating - ** 2 stars.