Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written, provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books, we live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age.

Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the reading adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape,

save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls,

it is grey. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast,

although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing. Just a pistol

to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road,

the clothes they are wearing a cart of scavenged food and each other.

That is the synopsis from the back cover of Cormick McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning The Road. Over the course of our discussion

about Cormac McCarthy's The Road, we may touch on plot points that will prove to be spoilers. So if you

haven't already read the book through, I would highly recommend you do so and then enjoy the show.

Published in 2006, Cormac McCarthy's The Road Won the Pulitzer in 2007, and we continue today to read and find ourselves haunted by this novel.

We read it, but do we heed it? Do we heed the implicit warning at the heart of the road,

if indeed there is one? Now, we might argue, and we could make a very compelling case for the fact

that McCarthy is not embedding any implicit warning in the novel. We may find ourselves

tempted to ask, is the road an ecological novel, for example? And that would be on us. That is the

reading we bring to the book. That's what we're imposing on the work. And whilst McCarthy

likely wasn't writing the road overtly as a warning of where we're headed if we don't change,

...