New Cormac McCarthy Novels ‘The Passenger’ And ‘Stella Maris’ To Be Published By Knopf This Fall

Matt Grobar
·5-min read

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group imprint Alfred A. Knopf announced today that it will publish Cormac McCarthy’s new novels The Passenger and Stella Maris this fall. The former title will be published on October 25, with the latter being unveiled on November 22, and a box set of both volumes set for publication on December 6.

The novels, set eight years apart, tell one grand story of siblings Bobby and Alicia Western.

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The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God. 1980, Pass Christian, Mississippi: It is three in the morning when Bobby zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flightbag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father (one of the inventors of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima); and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. McCarthy’s latest traverses the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, examining the legacy of sin and the madness that is human consciousness.

Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. 1972, Black River Falls, Wisconsin: Alicia, 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, the book is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.

Rights to the works were sold by Amanda Urban at ICM Partners. In addition to the U.S., the books will be published in the UK (Picador), Spain (Literatura Random House), Holland (Arbeiderspers), Germany (Rowohlt), Italy (Einaudi), France (Editions de l’Olivier), Sweden (Bonniers), Norway (Gyldendal), Denmark (Gyldendal), Finland (WSOY) and Brazil (Companhia). All books will be published by Knopf in hardcover, as ebooks and in audio, being published in trade paper by Vintage a year later.

“Knopf is thrilled to be publishing two new novels from one of our most celebrated writers. For nearly six decades, Cormac McCarthy’s books have changed the literary landscape and influenced generations of authors and artists. The publications of THE PASSENGER and STELLA MARIS will be the literary event of the year,” said Knopf EVP and Publisher Reagan Arthur. “These extraordinary novels are unlike anything Cormac McCarthy has written before, and while both should be read and experienced separately, they represent two sides of the same narrative coin. We are extremely proud to be publishing the remarkable, inimitable work of Cormac McCarthy.”

Added VP, Executive Editor and McCarthy’s editor at Knopf, Jenny Jackson: “It is no small feat for a writer to create a new work in the wake THE ROAD, but with THE PASSENGER and STELLA MARIS, Cormac McCarthy has exceeded our every expectation. These are two stunning, shocking works that manage to be both thrillingly plotted and intellectually exhilarating. We have a plane crash, a trove of gold coins buried deep underground and hidden in copper pipes, a rare Amati violin that vanishes, an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the ocean, and an Italian racecar seized by the IRS—an utterly gripping tale. As exciting as all those elements are, the novels go even further, questioning reality, the existence of God, investigating the history of math, physics, and philosophy, and conjuring a love story that is as pure as it is damned. Bobby and Alicia Western are two of the most captivating characters in recent memory and it’s an enormous privilege to be able to share them with Cormac McCarthy’s legion of readers.”

The preeminent American author has previously published works including The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of Dark, Suttree, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men and The Road, among others, seeing All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country adapted for film by Billy Bob Thornton, John Hillcoat and Joel and Ethan Coen, respectively. His books have been published in 48 territories across the globe, winning awards including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Coens’ No Country is perhaps the most iconic adaptation of his work for film, having won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, upon its release in 2007.

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group is a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Their parent company is the international media company, Bertelsmann AG.

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