Stella Maris

(Paperback)

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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 enquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.

Reviews

Remarkable a staggering achievement * Scotsman *
His sentences have the solidity of stones and the clarity of diamonds * Financial Times *
A true work of literature If McCarthys goal was for these books to haunt readers long after they are set aside, then he has succeeded. * LA Review of Books *
Remarkable [Stella Maris] harmonises both sadly and gorgeously with its recent predecessor. Side by side, both novels affirm the extraordinary poetry and strangeness of McCarthys vision * Sydney Morning Herald *
Like Bachs concertos, these triumphant novels depart the realm of art and encroach upon science, aimed at some Platonic point beyond our reckoning where all spheres converge * TIME *
Great additions to McCarthy's already outstanding oeuvre and proof that the mind of one of our greatest living writers is as sharp as it has ever been. * NPR *

Author Bio

The novels of the American writer Cormac McCarthy have received a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country for Old Men - the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture.