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Photos of books by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger and Stella Maris are a stunning achievement from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road.

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger

The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.

1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flightbag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.

Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

STELLA MARIS

Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.

1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers.

Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.

The Passenger Box Set

The Passenger Box Set

About Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy

The novels of the American writer Cormac McCarthy have received a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country for Old Men—the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. He died in 2023.
(photo © Beowulf Sheehan)

Listen to an audio clip from The Passenger

The Passenger: Trailer

Honors and Awards

2008 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (The Road)

1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (All the Pretty Horses)

1992 National Book Award for Fiction (All the Pretty Horses)

1981 MacArthur Fellowship

1969 Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing 1969

1966-68 Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1966-68)

1966 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel (The Orchard Keeper)

1965 Traveling Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Contact

Publicity Inquiries: knopfpublicity @ penguinrandomhouse [dot] com

Rights Inquiries: Daisy [dot] Meyrick @ caa [dot] com

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