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There is no comfortable way to read The Road. Cormac McCarthy's tenth novel - winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - is not a book you enjoy so much as survive. It deposits you in a scorched, ash-covered America alongside an unnamed father and his young son as they push a shopping cart southward toward the coast, and it dares you to keep walking with them.

The cause of the catastrophe is never explained, and that ambiguity is one of the novel's great strengths. Whether the world ended by asteroid, nuclear exchange, or something else entirely is beside the point. What matters is the aftermath - a landscape of incinerated corpses, perpetual grey skies, and a civilisation reduced to its most predatory impulses. The few remaining survivors fall broadly into two camps: those clinging to some residual morality and those who have abandoned it altogether, most horrifyingly in their turn to cannibalism. One particular scene involving a basement functions as the novel's most sickening set piece, and McCarthy's restraint in letting the reader piece together what is happening makes it all the more devastating.

The prose style will be polarising. McCarthy strips his sentences to the bone - no quotation marks, irregular punctuation, no chapter breaks, and stretches of sentence fragments that read almost like inventory lists of a ruined world. For some, this will feel like affectation. For others, it is inseparable from the story being told; the economy of language mirrors the economy of survival, where every word, like every calorie, must be justified. When McCarthy does allow himself a moment of lyricism, it lands with startling force precisely because the surrounding text is so austere.

At its heart, though, The Road is less a post-apocalyptic thriller than it is a study of parenthood under impossible pressure. The father's love for his son is ferocious and all-consuming - the one force that gives structure and direction to an existence that has lost both. Their sparse, repetitive exchanges carry an enormous emotional weight. The boy serves as the story's moral compass, instinctively wanting to help strangers even as his father teaches him the brutal calculus of scarcity. There is something deeply affecting about a child who has never known the world before the disaster still possessing a goodness that feels innate rather than learned.

There are legitimate criticisms to be levelled. The boy's persistent fragility - his tearfulness, his need for constant reassurance - can feel at odds with the fact that this is a child who has known nothing but this harsh reality. A child raised in genuine danger might reasonably be more hardened than McCarthy allows him to be. The ending, too, arrives with a neatness that sits uneasily against the relentless bleakness of everything that precedes it, as though McCarthy himself was uncertain how to conclude a journey defined by its apparent endlessness.

None of this, however, diminishes the novel's cumulative power. The Road is a book that changes depending on when you read it. Come to it as a parent and it will hollow you out. Come to it as a reader of post-apocalyptic fiction and you may find it both less plot-driven and more emotionally demanding than the genre typically delivers. At barely two hundred pages, it wastes nothing - and says more than most novels five times its length.