NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • T he second volume of The Passenger series from The Pulitzer
Prize–winning author of The Road • An intimate portrait of grief and longing as a young woman
in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. " The richest and strongest
work of McCarthy’s career…An achievement greater than Blood Meridian …or… The Road .” — The
Atlantic 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.
