Tackling themes of ethics, science and haunting family legacies, McCarthy's tour de force - the first of a hugely exciting literary duet - finds Bobby Western attempting to outrun shadowy organisations and the ghost of his atom bomb-inventing father in pursuit of the truth about a sunken jet and its missing passenger.
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 a true American master.
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9780330457439
Number of pages: 432
Weight: 307 g
Dimensions: 197 x 130 x 32 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
An appealing piece of work . . . gripping, with plenty of reflection and evocation - The Daily Telegraph
The 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 Guardian
A moving and characteristically disconcerting addition to the oeuvre of one of America’s greatest writers - The Irish Times
Critics 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 newspaper
Kafka on the bayou - Observer
Magisterial - Financial Times
McCarthy’s formidable talents for dialogue, perfect sentences and descriptions of the natural world remain undiminished - The Times
The Passenger also happens to be something of a masterpiece… It is [McCarthy’s] most ambitious work. - TIME
The 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 Atlantic
An intellectual experience that’s not quite like anything else out there, laced with the eerie beauty that only Cormac McCarthy can offer. - Vox
In 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
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