Stella Maris

Sixteen years after his bestseller "The Road," Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy returns with his two-volume masterpiece "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris": two unparalleled novels. The truth of one negates that of the other.

1972, Black River Falls, Wisconsin: Alicia Western, twenty years old, checks herself into a psychiatric facility with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag and a manifest wish to die. The diagnosis for the brilliant young mathematician and virtuoso violinist: paranoid schizophrenia. She does not speak of her brother Bobby. Instead, she contemplates madness, the human insistence on a shared experience of the world, her childhood, in which her grandmother feared for her - or did she fear her? Alicia's thoughts revolve around the intersections of physics, philosophy, and art, the nature of language. And she grapples with her self-called spirits, grotesque chimeras that only she can see and hear. The transcripts of her conversations with her psychiatrist reveal a genius driven mad by the insurmountability of the limits of knowledge, finding no redemption in the realm of the spiritual or in an impossible love, and radically questioning our notions of God, truth, and existence.