
Stella Maris
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Narrated by:
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Julia Whelan
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Edoardo Ballerini
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By:
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Cormac McCarthy
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The second volume of The Passenger series, from The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road • An intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.
"The richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…An achievement greater than Blood Meridian…or…The Road.”—The Atlantic
1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: 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 Alicia’s 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.
©2022 Cormac McCarthy (P)2022 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















Critic reviews
“[Stella Maris] is a Tom Stoppardesque bull session. Does it work? Uh-huh. Does it work more fully if you’ve already read The Passenger? Absolutely…Stella Maris is…[an] elegiac novel. It’s best read while you are still buzzing from the previous book. Its themes are dark ones, and yet it brings you home, like the piano coda at the end of “Layla.” No one in the real world talks the way Alicia does — she’s seeing with her third eye, flexing her middle finger at the world, rocking her family’s thundersome legacy — but they might if they could. She lays down…cataclysmic one-liners…All this is cut with humor…The most moving moments in Stella Maris braid [Alicia’s] feelings for her brother, which go through her like a spear, with a sense of intellectual futility. Reading Stella Maris after The Passenger is like trying to hang onto a dream you’ve been having. It’s an uncanny, unsettling dream, tuned into the static of the universe.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"In the new pair of novels...a fresh space is made to enable the exchange of ideas, and the rhetorical consequences are felt in the very textures of the fiction....[McCarthy's] ear for dialogue has always been impeccable; in these novels...people think and speak rationally, mundanely, intelligently, crazily, as they do in real life...And along with the excellent dialogue there are scores of lovely noticings, often of the natural world....Authoritatively eloquent."—James Wood, The New Yorker
"Cormac McCarthy has never been better…The booming, omnipotent narrative voice, which first appeared in McCarthy’s Western novels of the 1980s...has ebbed almost entirely in these books…What remain are human voices, which is to say characters, contending with one another and with their own fears and regrets, as they face the prospect of the godless void that awaits them. The result is…pleasurable, and together the books are the richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…McCarthy’s latest…novels represent a return to human concerns, but ones—love, death, guilt, illusion—experienced and scrutinized on the highest existential plane…As a pair, The Passenger and Stella Maris are an achievement greater than Blood Meridian…or…The Road…In the new novels, McCarthy again sets bravery and ingenuity loose amid inhumanity….The results are not weakly flickering. They are incandescent with life."—Graeme Wood, The Atlantic
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Haunting
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Okay with peaking into the void, you will not find two more life affirming novels. Cormac asks us to hold his hand. Is not that what one does at the end?
Genius The Passenger; Stella Maris
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Having 2 AMAZING narrators really made it feel like I was “watching” a movie. EB is my favorite!!! I’m so glad he’s everywhere
Amazing narrations!
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My Brain Hurts
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engaging and thought provoking
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This makes you realize how on another level Cormac McCarthy was. He gives you one book, which is like a locked treasure chest, and then a companion book of character dialogue, that acts like the key to the chest.
Just amazing.
Necessary
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Highly recommend listening vs reading but when I did both at once I could reach further in. 10 stars on a 5 star scale.)
Literally Breathtaking and Literally Extraordinary
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Cormac McCarthy is the best author in American history
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If a studied author is to leave one legacy before dying (as Cormac McCarthy has done by exiting the Earth mere months after publication of these two novels), it would be to move the readers (essentially students at this point) to study THEMSELVES. To move a book’s readers to study their own mark on this world. And perhaps more importantly, what we, as readers/students/humans, actually believe the point to it all is?
How much grief can we take before we can see its worth? And will we know the answer when we reach it? Have we already passed the point of understanding and not even realized we have the answers we need already?
Philosophy and mathematics in fiction storytelling has never hit quite this brazen a musical note.
Five (hundred) stars.
Chilling, Haunting, Sad, Sadder, Saddest.
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Remarkable Performance of a Remarkable Book
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