Stella Maris

Best-seller at the New York Times. The second book of The Passenger is authored by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road. Intimate depiction of loss and yearning, Stella Maris follows a young lady in a mental health institution as she tries to make sense of her own life.

BLACK RIVER FALLS, 1972 Twenty-year-old Alicia Western checks herself into the hospital with forty thousand bucks in a plastic bag. Alicia, a University of Chicago PhD candidate in mathematics, has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and is reluctant to discuss her brother Bobby. Instead, she examines the nature of insanity and people's insistence on having a single, shared understanding of the world; she remembers a time when, at the age of seven, her own grandmother began to worry about her; she examines the nexus of philosophy and physics; and she presents her companions, her chimeras, the hallucinations that are visible only to her. She continues to weep for Bobby, who is neither quite dead nor fully hers. Stella Maris is a thought-provoking, meticulous, and intellectually demanding conclusion to The Passenger, a philosophical investigation that challenges our ideas of God, truth, and existence. It is told completely via the transcripts of Alicia's mental health appointments.