I just read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I found it exceptionally gripping. It's not the usual sort of book you'd describe as a 'page-turner', given how grim it is, but that was the effect of the book on me: having to find out what would come next, where it was leading, how it could possibly end. Not to give too much away - out of consideration for those of you who haven't yet read it and mean to - the story is of a father and son making their way south towards the coast after a catastrophe (possibly nuclear) that has wrecked the world and all civilization with it. They struggle for everything, especially food, and there is the constant danger from other straggling survivors who might kill them for any food they have or indeed to eat them.
It is a world bare of hope - but in which there is nonetheless a kind of irreducible practical hope, represented by the road itself, the man and boy simply going on from one day to the next for no reason beyond the going on. And a second thing as well, not hope exactly, but the sense that there are things to be affirmed, preserved, despite everything, even in extremis: the love of the father for his son, whose moral impulses in turn are not ones you'd expect him to have acquired on this ruined and ghastly terrain, the care of each of them for the other, and the resolution that there are some things they will not do.