It’s a father’s dual desire to at once save his boy and teach him as quickly as possible what he’ll need to know in the almost assured event that they’ll become forever separated that’s the heartbeat of this book. Despite its brutal onslaught, its deeply dark and desperate journey of a father and son through post-apocalyptic America, there’s a tenderness in this one that haunts the whole book. But The Road, for me, marked a turning point for McCarthy. His sombre and dramatic and delirious language, his characters’ propensity for bad, bad decisions, hell, even his refusal to use standard punctuation when it comes to dialogue, have always marked him as a literary outsider, a truly rebellious voice in the American tradition of what are too often fake rebel yells. It is kind of difficult to read, so Im kind of 'struggling' with it. But if I must decide on one book that has haunted me the most in these last ten years, it is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Im reading a Cormac McCarthys book called 'The road'. How do you choose just one? I’ve been amazed and shaken and obsessed by so many books that have impacted me in different ways: finding my older sister’s copy of The Outsiders when I was 12 years old and then consuming it in a fever for two days straight, on the final page making the realisation that I desperately needed to become a novelist discovering Jack Kerouac’s On the Road at age 16 and again becoming so obsessed with it that I myself hit the road for the next decade in my quest to write before I managed to settle down a little bit.
As a writer, one of the more difficult questions I’m asked is if I have a favourite novel.
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