The Passenger

"One of the best living writers is back after 16 years with two intertwined novels about troubled siblings who love each other in an improper way. The Passenger follows a salvage diver who’s haunted by both his past and his sister as he gets involved in a bizarre case of a missing body. Stella Maris, the second novel, tells the sister’s story, but entirely through her conversations with a doctor at a mental institution. The two narratives are dense, immersive and unique, and they inhabit a bizarre interstitial space between thrillers, literary fiction, love stories, philosophy, quantum mechanics and that particular brand of weird darkness that Cormac McCarthy is known for."

"I will return to Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger, as I do much of his work."

""The Passenger" is classic McCarthy: inventive, insightful and sometimes surreal."

"The literary event of the season must surely be the publication of Cormac McCarthy ‘s first new books since the devastating, Pulitzer Prize-winning, post-apocalyptic The Road in 2006. McCarthy returns now with not one, but two linked novels, which together tell the story of Bobby and Alicia Western, a brother and sister pair tormented by 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 book 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.”) The novels will be released in close succession in the United States: The Passenger on Oct 25, 2022 and Stella Maris on Nov 20, 2022 . A box set will follow the following month. (The books will be released simultaneously in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.) You may also be pleased to hear that Maggie O’Farrell—whose Women’s Prize-winning novel about the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet — found enormous critical and commercial success, has just released a new, much-buzzed-about novel. The Marriage Portrait considers the marriage of Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and the ill-fated Lucrezia, 15-year-old daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici, ruler of Florence."