Tony Bradman is a children's author who has written poetry, picture book texts and fiction. His latest book, co-written with his son Tom Bradman, is Titanic: Death on the Water, a short novel for children about one boy's experience on the most famous ship in history.For the Guardian, he named his top ten father and son stories. One book on the list:
The Road by Cormac McCarthyRead about the other entries on the list.
My son thinks I'm a total wimp as I can only watch things like The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later from between my fingers, especially if anychildren are in danger. So you can imagine just how difficult I found The Road, Cormac McCarthy's vision of a devastated, post-apocalyptic future in which a father is utterly determined to save his nine-year-old son from a fate much worse than anything Tiny Tim might encounter, the options being starvation or ending up as kebabs for some particularly nasty cannibals. The writing is extraordinary, and although it's clearly a fable, the characters are so clearly drawn they stay with you long after you finish the book. I've got the DVD of the film version, and one of these days I'll get around to watching it. But not just yet.
The Road appears on Ramin Karimloo's six favorite books list, Jon Krakauer's five best list of books about mortality and existential angst, William Skidelsky's list of the top ten most vivid accounts of being marooned in literature, Liz Jensen's top 10 list of environmental disaster stories, the Guardian's list of books to change the climate, David Nicholls' top ten list of literary tear jerkers, and the Times (of London) list of the 100 best books of the decade. Sam Anderson of New York magazine claims "that we'll still be talking about [The Road] in ten years."
--Marshal Zeringue
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