BookS

Wow. This is one of the most amazing books I have read in a long time. It's actually now an Oprah book club pick, but should not be discounted because of that. In fact, it also won the Pulitzer. It is a challenging and dark and a disturbing read, but it is beautifully written. It takes place in a post-apocolyptic America, and follows a man and his son as they trek across the ashen and desolate countryside trying to survive and find safety or some place of refuge. Here is an excerpt from the book:

"They began to come across from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterns. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then, all stores of food had been given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in, and drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond."