A father and son walk through the ash of America after an unnamed catastrophe, pushing a shopping cart containing everything they own. Cormac McCarthy published this in 2006, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. The prose is his most stripped down, the terror unrelenting, and yet the relationship between father and son glows at the center. 'Carrying the fire' becomes the phrase for whatever remains human in the ruins. The novel is bleak and also, somehow, affirming. The love is real.