A father and his young son walk south through the ash-choked ruin of the United States, some unnamed catastrophe having extinguished nearly all life and left a grey, freezing wasteland behind it. Pushing a shopping trolley of salvage and carrying a revolver with only a few rounds, the man means to reach the coast before winter and before his own failing health gives out, while shielding the boy from the roving gangs and cannibals who now hunt the survivors. They scavenge abandoned houses and bunkers, ration what little they find, and repeat to each other the private creed that keeps them human: they are the good guys, and they are carrying the fire. McCarthy strips his prose to a spare, unpunctuated bareness that reviewers read as both scripture and dirge, so that tenderness registers all the more sharply against the desolation. Beneath the survival narrative it is a meditation on love as the last defence against nihilism, and on what a parent owes a child in a world with no future left to promise.
