Cormac McCarthy Releasing 2 Books This Year!

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This fall, McCarthy, 88, is publishing not only “The Passenger,” but also a second, related novel, titled “Stella Maris.” McCarthy’s longtime publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, will release them one month apart.

The intertwined novels — which represent a major stylistic and thematic departure for McCarthy — tell the doomed love story of a brother and sister. The siblings, Bobby and Alicia Western, are tormented by the legacy of their father, a physicist who helped develop the atom bomb, and by their love for and obsession with one another.

Much of McCarthy’s earlier work is set in the American South and Southwest, and hinges on his fascination with good and evil and humanity’s bottomless capacity for violence and vengeance. In “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” he tackles more cerebral subjects: the history of math and physics, the nature of reality and consciousness, whether religion and science can coexist, and the relationship between genius and madness.

“He’s exploring elements of philosophy and some of the bigger life questions more directly on the page,” said Reagan Arthur, the publisher of Knopf.

It’s also the first time that McCarthy has built a narrative around a female protagonist. In “Stella Maris,” he inhabits the shattered psyche of Alicia Western, a math prodigy whose intellect frightens people and whose hallucinations appear as characters, with their own distinct voices.

“The Passenger,” which comes out on Oct. 25, takes place in 1980, in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. The plot is set in motion when Bobby, a salvage diver, gets assigned to explore the wreckage of a sunken jet off the coast of Mississippi, and discovers that the plane’s black box, the pilot’s flight bag and the body of one of the passengers are all missing. With the pace and twists of a thriller, the 400-page narrative follows Bobby, who is haunted by his memories of his father and sister, as he gets drawn into the mystery of the plane crash, and realizes he may have uncovered something nefarious when strange men in suits show up at his home.

“The Passenger” will arrive on Oct. 25, and “Stella Maris” on Nov. 22.
“Stella Maris,” which will be released on Nov. 22 and serves as a coda to “The Passenger,” tells Alicia’s story, over roughly 200 pages. The narrative unfolds entirely in dialogue, as a transcript between Alicia and her doctor at a psychiatric institution in Wisconsin in 1972, where Alicia, a 20-year-old doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, receives a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.

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