Recommendations
Books Like The Road
Best books to read after The Road by Cormac McCarthy
If McCarthy's post-apocalyptic father-and-son survival story moved you, these picks span his other novels, the tradition of American literary post-apocalyptic fiction, and the literature of love in extremity.
- 1Buy
No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
The companion novel, published the year before — the same stripped prose, the same nihilistic violence, the most accessible McCarthy.
- 2Buy
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's most ambitious work — the 1850s borderlands as pure violence, the Judge as an earlier Chigurh.
- 3Buy
All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
The lyrical McCarthy — John Grady Cole in Mexico, the coming-of-age before the darkness.
- 4Buy
Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
The post-apocalyptic novel with the opposite emotional register — art and community surviving collapse, hope where McCarthy is ash.
- 5Buy
The Children of Men
by P.D. James
A different kind of civilizational end — humanity unable to reproduce, Theo Faron in a dying world.
- 6Buy
Riddley Walker
by Russell Hoban
The most formally radical post-apocalyptic novel — a degraded English language for a degraded world, 2000 years after the bomb.
- 7Buy
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy
The earlier, denser McCarthy — Knoxville and the Tennessee River, the maximalist prose before The Road stripped it bare.
- 8Buy
American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
Another Pulitzer-winning meditation on the father-child relationship under external destruction — the American Dream destroyed as a family's world is destroyed.
More The Road Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.