The Road
A post-Apocalyptic tome full of despair amidst a vicious wasteland, held together by heartbreakingly beautiful & poetic writing, and a glimmer of the human spirit, if not hope.
I love Cormac McCarthy's writing, which to me feels perfectly sparse in the sense of no wasted words, and precise with few peers. His novels often carry Biblical weight, with themes outside time regardless of the setting, and the sense of timelessness is felt piercingly in The Road.
This reverberated and shook me more than my first reading now that I have a son. McCarthy has squeezed the life out of the world that a man and his son inhabit, but there is a fullness of emotion in their conversations and relationship while travelling... somewhere, more away than towards.