The Passenger – Cormac McCarthy

It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates a sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats. Missing from the crash site are 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, inventor of the atom bomb; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.From the bar rooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness, and one of the final works by Cormac McCarthy, a true American master. Review An appealing piece of work . . . gripping, with plenty of reflection and evocation ― The Daily TelegraphThe Passenger is like a submerged ship itself; a gorgeous ruin in the shape of a hardboiled noir thriller . . . What a glorious sunset song . . . It’s rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic ― The GuardianA moving and characteristically disconcerting addition to the oeuvre of one of America’s greatest writers ― The Irish TimesCritics have detected the influence on him of Faulkner and Hemingway, but this is to understate his achievement. The Passenger shows that McCarthy belongs in the company of Melville and Dostoevsky, writers the world will never cease to need ― New Statesman[A] gripping story, written in McCarthy’s trademark acerbic style ― i newspaperKafka on the bayou ― ObserverMagisterial ― Financial TimesMcCarthy’s formidable talents for dialogue, perfect sentences and descriptions of the natural world remain undiminished ― The TimesThe Passenger also happens to be something of a masterpiece… It is [McCarthy’s] most ambitious work. ― TIMEThe novels McCarthy published in 2022, at the age of 89, permanently resolve the question of whether McCarthy is a great novelist… together the books are the richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career ― The AtlanticAn intellectual experience that’s not quite like anything else out there, laced with the eerie beauty that only Cormac McCarthy can offer. ― VoxIn Stella Maris and The Passenger, McCarthy invites us to consider hopelessness not just to give us hope but to compel us to make use of it. Having lived for nearly 100 years, he has given us what may well be the last great novels of the long 20th century. He may also help point us in a different direction for the twenty-first. ― The Nation About the Author Cormac McCarthy was the author of many acclaimed novels, including The Road and Blood Meridian. Among his honours are the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for lifetime achievement in American literature.