"[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 "If [Stella Maris and The Passenger] end up being McCarthy's epitaph, we can say he went out with a majestic shudder in keeping with his best work. They echo not just his own greatest hits but a pantheon of American literature: the baroque language and sentence structure of Faulkner; the terse, laconic dialogue of Hemingway; even the paranoid poetry of DeLillo....McCarthy's world remains no country for resolution, except for the inevitable one that concludes six feet under. In the meantime, the horizon is obscured by the darkening rim of the world." --Chris Vognar, The Boston Globe "A deep dive into psychological dysfunction and a further inquiry into the mechanics of existence --inasmuch as that can be understood....Thrilling." --David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times "[Stella Maris and The Passenger] illuminate each other, and yet the relation between them is no easier to define than one between actual breathing people....Stella Maris is...rigorously structured...Electrifying...McCarthy's language has all the richness of the King James Bible, its cadences slow and forever beautiful and forever at odds with the world it describes....I felt like crying myself as I approached the end of Stella Maris, the end of this dark enthralling pair." --Michael Gorra, The New York Review of Books "With the publication of The Passenger and its companion novel Stella Maris, McCarthy seems to be done mining the myth of America. Instead, he ponders what it means to exist, and what our history tells us about our future... He digs into the big ideas of the universe, like human existence and what it means, as well as what our history and memory mean. He's searching for something different... Where other writers venture into the mind and soul, McCarthy has leapt past that to ask what a soul is--and if it even exists...McCarthy is no longer searching in the dirt trail across the West and saying, 'This is it. This is our human nature.' In The Passenger and Stella Maris, he's trying to see the God that made the man who wrote those words." --Kevin Koczwara, Esquire "Sometimes I think the reason literary criticism got obsessed with evaluating prose as 'sentences' over the past few decades is simply that McCarthy's are so good. They rattle out at you like little bullets, mean and punchy and precise... Taken together, [The Passenger and Stella Maris] offer an intellectual experience that's not quite like anything else out there, laced with the eerie beauty that only Cormac McCarthy can offer." --Constance Grady, Vox "[A] masterpiece...The new books are ambitious, impressively different from [McCarthy's] previous work. They are structured with great elegance and originality, funny, at times surprisingly (and terrifyingly) light--and layered with enough puzzles and resonances to occupy a reader indefinitely. This work may be McCarthy's greatest. It is the product of a writer at the peak of his powers taking his most explicit approach to his lifelong themes...The chronological loop between the two books is beautiful in itself, and the cockeyed structure is like nothing I have encountered in literature." --Valerie Stivers, Compact "As a window into a great writer's intellectual preoccupations, Stella Maris is invaluable... Stella Maris is... a neat mirror of The Passenger It fills in gaps in Bobby's story and shows us the siblings' shared history from Alicia's point of view. In The Passenger, Alicia is a cipher--all the more intriguing for being inaccessible to the reader. In Stella Maris, McCarthy lifts the veil on his mysterious creation." --Maggie Doherty, The New Republic

Cormac McCarthy is the author of many acclaimed novels, including All the Pretty Horses, No Country For Old Men and The Road. Among his honours are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.