num_pages: 190
description: NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER  The Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Road returns with the second volume of The Passenger Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.McCarthys art is transcendent even as it takes no prisoners an achievement akin only to the oeuvres of his greatest peers Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. He will endure.  Oprah Daily The richest and strongest work of McCarthys careerAn achievement greater than Blood Meridian or The Road .  The Atlantic1972 BLACK RIVER FALLS Alicia Western 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 Alicias psychiatric sessions Stella Maris is a searching rigorous intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God truth and existence.
language: English
title: Stella Maris
publisher: Knopf