The Road
In The Road, a father and son traverse a bleak landscape after the apocalypse. The father knows he is dying. He knows they can’t survive another winter so they head south through California toward the coast. All of Cormac McCarthy’s great fiction is grim—All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. But no other book by McCarthy is so unremittingly grim as The Road. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adopted as a film in 2009.