The Road by Cormac McCarthy:

"If he is not the word of God, God never spoke." It's a line spoken by The Man, unnamed, early on in the 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. It's this line, elegiac and moving, infused with despair and hope, that informs you, you're not reading something you'll easily forget.

A story about a father and a son trudging through a post-apocalyptic countryside, struggling to stay alive through every malady you would expect from such a circumstance, is infused with lines just as powerful.

It is, at its heart, a study of the love and bond between father and child against a world where love had died long before. The apocalypse is never named and never needs to be. It is simply a plot device, a foundation from upon which to build the tale.

Cormac McCarthy is known for writing prose that borders on the poetic, his punctuation and sentence structure uncommon and fluid. Every sentence in "The Road" is a prayer, an incantation, to a power higher than ourselves. You cannot read the novel without seeing yourself in one of the roles and thus, cannot read it unprepared. It will break your heart in ways you might not even understand at first.

When I first read the book, not long after it had come out, I thought it was one of the greatest things I'd ever read. It was an instant classic that could rival anything that was deemed a classic previously. That was before I had a child of my own. Reading it after becoming a father myself, is almost impossible. Not because the book changed but because I did and the book exposed it.

You learn quickly that your life is forfeit in place of your child's. Even though The Man may have made decisions, that in hindsight, could be considered naive, or even selfish, they were the only ones he could have made. The Road he chose was hard, but it was the only one with hope. The Man is faced with the consequences of his decisions and the second guessing that comes with them throughout the story but his ultimate conclusion is always the same, his child deserves a chance at life.

The novel's end is left ambiguous and it's left to the reader to decide whether The Man was right or wrong, but it does have an end after the writer's own fashion. McCarthy is known for leaving the future unpredicted by the end of his novels. It's not a plot device, nor is it an easy way out. It is truth. The future may be known by the writer, but it's us who decide it.

I would encourage everyone to read this book and to listen to the audiobook narrated by Tom Stechschulte, who reads a line the way most of us sounded it in our heads, but be prepared for having your heart's worst fears laid bare and your soul exposed to truths only the greatest stories can tell.