Two Cormac McCarthy novels to be published by Picador
By CityLife Arts Writer
This autumn, Picador will publish two new novels by Cormac McCarthy. Rights to the works were sold by Amanda Urban at ICM Partners. In addition to South Africa, the books will be published in the US (Knopf), the UK (Picador), Australia (Picador), India (Picador), Spain (Penguin Random House), Holland (Arbeiderspers), Germany (Rowohlt), Italy (Einaudi), France (Editions de l’Olivier), Sweden (Bonniers), Norway (Gyldendal), Denmark (Gyldendal), Finland (WSOY), and Brazil (Companhia). McCarthy is published in 48 territories across the globe.
THE PASSENGER, the first of the two novels, will be published on October 25. STELLA MARIS, the second book, will be published on November 22, alongside a box set of both volumes. The novels, set eight years apart, tell one grand story of siblings Bobby and Alicia Western.
The books will be published in hardcover, and as ebooks. Lavish slipcased special editions and a deluxe, numbered limited boxed set will also be available.
Philip Gwyn Jones, Picador Publisher said ‘Picador is delighted to be publishing new novels this year from one of America’s most important living writers. Picador has been McCarthy’s proud British publisher for decades, and longed for the arrival of these next two novels. Every lover of Cormac McCarthy’s prose will thrill to them, as they explore landscapes and characters and questions and relationships that we have never encountered in his work before. Bobby and Alicia Western have to be two of the most captivating characters in contemporary American literature and it will be an enormous privilege to introduce them to Cormac McCarthy’s legion of readers old and new this autumn.’
About The Passenger
The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God. 1980, Pass Christian, Mississippi: 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 the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation.
Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, 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 (one of the inventors of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima); and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul. Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms 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.
About Stella Maris
Tella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.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.
About Cormac McCarthy
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.