This is a compelling novel - hardly surprising given its prize winning status. It is both bleak (VERY bleak) and beautiful, the story of the love between a father and son who are on a journey of survival (the Road of the title) in a post apocalyptic world. We are left to draw our own conclusions about the cause of the apocalypse, this is an existential piece in which cause and history is irrelevant, nothing that was, is any longer, other than the few survivors - and they are not what they once were. The father and son, however, hold onto a remnant of hope - "the fire". Through his profound talent with words, McCarthy takes us on the journey with the two protagonists,in language that like the landscape,is sparse but overwhelming in its descriptive power. It is ultimately a triumph of the power of a father's love and a little boy's trust that somewhere, in some of the few of the world's survivors, there is still good to be found in the prevailing horror and evil that is the struggle to survive. Or indeed, is the triumph that humanity itself survives in a world that is post civilization as we know it? A book of many layers. More than, "Very Good", this book is a masterpiece.