Stella Maria and the Passenger

About the book

The Passenger

1980, Mississippi.

It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges into the darkness of the ocean. His dive light illuminates a sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation.

Missing from the crash site are the pilot's flight bag, the plane's black box – and the tenth passenger . . . Now a collateral witness to this disappearance, Bobby is discouraged from speaking of what he has seen. He is a man haunted: 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.

Stella Maris

Alicia Western is the following: Twenty years old. A brilliant mathematician at the University of Chicago. And a paranoid schizophrenic who does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby.

Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Cormac McCarthy's Stella Maris is a profoundly moving companion to The Passenger. It is a powerful enquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and life itself.