The Passenger & Stella Maris

by Cormac McCarthy

Sixteen years after his devastating, Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic novel The Road was released, Cormac McCarthy—one of the greatest living American authors—has published two new linked novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. The two books (shown here as a boxset) tell the story of Bobby and Alicia Western, a brother and sister pair tormented by their family history—their physicist father helped invent the atom bomb. In The Passenger, salvage diver Bobby stumbles upon a murder mystery while exploring a submerged plane wreck. In Stella Maris—a novel that unfolds entirely through a transcript of dialogue—maths prodigy Alicia is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Jenny Jackson, McCarthy’s editor, described it to The New York Times as “a novel of ideas”. (“What do you do after you’ve written ‘The Road’?” Jackson added. “The answer is, two books that take on God and existence.”)