You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Cormac McCarthy is returning with two new novels for Picador in late 2022, 16 years after his last Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction The Road (Picador).
Rights to the books were snapped up from Amanda Urban at ICM Partners. The Passenger, the first of the two novels, will be published in hardback and e-book on 25th October followed by Stella Maris on 22nd November. “Lavish” £50 slipcase special editions will be available from 6th December alongside a deluxe, numbered limited boxed set priced at £100.
The novels, set eight years apart, tell one grand story of siblings Bobby and Alicia Western. The author delivered a full draft of Stella Maris and a partial draft of The Passenger to US publishers Knopf eight years ago, according to the New York Times, and the editors have kept the novels a secret until now.
Philip Gwyn Jones, Picador publisher, hailed McCarthy as “one of America’s most important living writers”. He said: “Picador has been McCarthy’s proud British publisher for decades, and longed for the arrival of these next two novels. Every lover of Cormac McCarthy’s prose will thrill to them, as they explore landscapes and characters and questions and relationships that we have never encountered in his work before. Bobby and Alicia Western have to be two of the most captivating characters in contemporary American literature and it will be an enormous privilege to introduce them to Cormac McCarthy’s legion of readers old and new this autumn.”
Bea Carvalho, Waterstones head of fiction, added: “The release of a new novel from Cormac McCarthy after so many years would have always marked one of the most exciting and longed-for moments in a bookseller’s year, but to be treated to two in such quick succession is a truly astonishing opportunity. We are tremendously excited to read The Passenger and Stella Maris, and can’t wait to start talking about them with our customers.”
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. Picador called it “a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness”.
Its synopsis explains: “1980, Pass Christian, Mississippi: 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 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.”
The second book, Stella Maris, is billed as an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. The book is told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia Western’s psychiatric sessions
The blurb states: “1972, Black River Falls, Wisconsin: Alicia Western, 20 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.”
In addition to the UK and US, the books will be published in Australia (Picador), India (Picador), South Africa, (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). McCarthy is published in 48 territories across the globe.