A dark ‘Road’ for Winfrey’s book club

It’s bleak, despairing and apocalyptic -- and it’s coming to “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

“The Road,” Cormac McCarthy’s dark vision of a post-holocaust America, was chosen Wednesday as the latest selection for Winfrey’s book club. The novel by McCarthy, 73, an author who almost never gives interviews, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in fiction and is also thought to be a major contender for a Pulitzer Prize this year.

Typically, the selection of Winfrey’s book club sparks a huge increase in sales across the nation.

In “The Road,” now in a Vintage Books paperback edition, a father and his son travel through a horrific, empty landscape where there is little or no hope, except for the power of human love.

-- Josh Getlin