A sunken jet. A missing body. A salvage diver entangled in a chilling conspiracy. From the bar rooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtakingly dark novel from Cormac McCarthy, the legendary author of No Country for Old Men and The Road.

‘A gorgeous ruin in the shape of a hardboiled noir thriller . . . What a glorious sunset song’ – The Guardian

1980, Mississippi. It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges into the darkness of the ocean. His dive light illuminates a 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 . . .

Now a collateral witness to this disappearance, Bobby is discouraged from speaking of what he has seen. He is a man haunted: by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima, and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.

One of the final works by Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger is book one in a duology, the companion to Stella Maris.

Praise for Cormac McCarthy:

‘McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute’ – Anne Enright, author of The Green Road

'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' – Stephen King, author of The Shining

'[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' – Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain

An appealing piece of work . . . gripping, with plenty of reflection and evocation * The Daily Telegraph *
The Passenger is like a submerged ship itself; a gorgeous ruin in the shape of a hardboiled noir thriller . . . What a glorious sunset song . . . It’s rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic * The Guardian *
A moving and characteristically disconcerting addition to the oeuvre of one of America’s greatest writers * The Irish Times *
Critics have detected the influence on him of Faulkner and Hemingway, but this is to understate his achievement. The Passenger shows that McCarthy belongs in the company of Melville and Dostoevsky, writers the world will never cease to need * New Statesman *
[A] gripping story, written in McCarthy’s trademark acerbic style * i newspaper *
Kafka on the bayou * Observer *
Magisterial * Financial Times *
McCarthy’s formidable talents for dialogue, perfect sentences and descriptions of the natural world remain undiminished * The Times *
The Passenger also happens to be something of a masterpiece… It is [McCarthy’s] most ambitious work. * TIME *
The novels McCarthy published in 2022, at the age of 89, permanently resolve the question of whether McCarthy is a great novelist… together the books are the richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career * The Atlantic *
An intellectual experience that’s not quite like anything else out there, laced with the eerie beauty that only Cormac McCarthy can offer. * Vox *
In Stella Maris and The Passenger, McCarthy invites us to consider hopelessness not just to give us hope but to compel us to make use of it. Having lived for nearly 100 years, he has given us what may well be the last great novels of the long 20th century. He may also help point us in a different direction for the twenty-first. * The Nation *

Cormac McCarthy was the author of many acclaimed novels, including Blood Meridian, Child of God and The Passenger. Among his honours are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 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. McCarthy died in 2023 in Santa Fe, NM at the age of 89.