Cormac McCarthy – author of twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays and two short stories – is one of the most enigmatic and reclusive superstars of the modern literary world.

Living and writing from El Paso, Texas, he has shunned all requests for interviews, appearances at bookshops or literary festivals. Nonetheless, he remains one of the most admired writers of the last fifty years. His novels have received extraordinary reviews, being hailed as masterpieces of American literature. The Passenger is his first novel since The Road (2006).

 ‘McCarthy writes prose as clean as a bullet cutting through the air and constructs tales as compelling as any you will read’ – Telegraph 

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, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous 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. Look for Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series, available December 2022.