Listen free for 30 days
-
The Passenger
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews, Julia Whelan
- Length: 12 hrs and 44 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wish list failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $29.14
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The first of a two-volume masterpiece, The Passenger series, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road • 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.
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work." —The New York Times
Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series, is available now.
1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light 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, inventor 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.
You may also enjoy...
-
Gravity's Rainbow
- Written by: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
-
-
Superb
- By William Pearce on 2021-04-05
Written by: Thomas Pynchon, and others
-
The Road
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst this destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still, they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world of utter devastation.
-
-
My first, only, audible review.
- By OL on 2019-04-03
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
-
All the Pretty Horses
- The Border Trilogy, Book One
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Frank Muller
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico.
-
-
A tour de force!
- By Sean E. Kearney on 2020-12-06
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
-
Child of God
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this taut, chilling audiobook, Lester Ballard - a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape - haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
-
-
Hard to listen to. Beautiful language
- By Rebus E Cat on 2024-10-18
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
-
No Country for Old Men
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cormac McCarthy, best-selling author of National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, delivers his first new novel in seven years. Written in muscular prose, No Country for Old Men is a powerful tale of the West that moves at a blistering pace.
-
-
Dark and nihilistic, deserving of the America’s it depicts
- By Anonymous User on 2022-02-13
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
-
Starfish
- Rifters Trilogy Series, Book 1
- Written by: Peter Watts
- Narrated by: Gabriel Vaughan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew - people who have been altered to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater - down to live and work in this weird, fertile undersea darkness.
-
-
a great start
- By Jackie Law on 2022-12-12
Written by: Peter Watts
-
Gravity's Rainbow
- Written by: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
-
-
Superb
- By William Pearce on 2021-04-05
Written by: Thomas Pynchon, and others
-
The Road
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
America is a barren landscape of smoldering ashes, devoid of life except for those people still struggling to scratch out some type of existence. Amidst this destruction, a father and his young son walk, always toward the coast, but with no real understanding that circumstances will improve once they arrive. Still, they persevere, and their relationship comes to represent goodness in a world of utter devastation.
-
-
My first, only, audible review.
- By OL on 2019-04-03
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
-
All the Pretty Horses
- The Border Trilogy, Book One
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Frank Muller
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole's grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico.
-
-
A tour de force!
- By Sean E. Kearney on 2020-12-06
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
-
Child of God
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this taut, chilling audiobook, Lester Ballard - a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape - haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
-
-
Hard to listen to. Beautiful language
- By Rebus E Cat on 2024-10-18
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
-
No Country for Old Men
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cormac McCarthy, best-selling author of National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, delivers his first new novel in seven years. Written in muscular prose, No Country for Old Men is a powerful tale of the West that moves at a blistering pace.
-
-
Dark and nihilistic, deserving of the America’s it depicts
- By Anonymous User on 2022-02-13
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
-
Starfish
- Rifters Trilogy Series, Book 1
- Written by: Peter Watts
- Narrated by: Gabriel Vaughan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A huge international corporation has developed a facility along the Juan de Fuca Ridge at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to exploit geothermal power. They send a bio-engineered crew - people who have been altered to withstand the pressure and breathe the seawater - down to live and work in this weird, fertile undersea darkness.
-
-
a great start
- By Jackie Law on 2022-12-12
Written by: Peter Watts
-
Underworld
- Written by: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
Written by: Don DeLillo
-
The Sound and the Fury
- Written by: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
-
-
Engaging on multiple levels
- By Anonymous User on 2022-05-27
Written by: William Faulkner
-
Last Night in Montreal
- Written by: Emily St. John Mandel
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility—when Lilia Albert was a child, her father appeared on the doorstep of her mother's house and took her away. Now, haunted by an inability to remember much about her early childhood, Lilia moves restlessly from city to city, abandoning lovers and eluding the private detective who has dedicated a career to following close behind.
-
-
I had to stop listening
- By C. Bergeron on 2023-03-03
Written by: Emily St. John Mandel
-
Blood Meridian
- Or the Evening Redness in the West
- Written by: Cormac McCarthy
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Author of the National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most provocative American stylists to emerge in the last century. The striking novel Blood Meridian offers an unflinching narrative of the brutality that accompanied the push west on the 1850s Texas frontier.
-
-
Do not hesitate to listen to this recording of BM.
- By Amazon Customer on 2019-04-28
Written by: Cormac McCarthy
-
Liberation Day
- Stories
- Written by: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders, Tina Fey, Michael McKean, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The “best short story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.
-
-
Surprising and thoughtful
- By Maria L. Lantin on 2022-12-21
Written by: George Saunders
-
Tree of Smoke
- A Novel
- Written by: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness.
Written by: Denis Johnson
What the critics say
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NEW YORK TIMES • GOODREADS • KIRKUS
CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE
“A total banger…[The Passenger] blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work. It’s the first novel I’ve read in years that I feel I need to read three more times to fully understand, and that I want to read three more times simply to savor. It’s so packed with funny, strange, haunted sentences that other writers will be stealing lines from it for epigraphs, as if it were Ecclesiastes, for the next 150 years….The whole thing reads like a cosmic, bleakly funny John D. MacDonald thriller…The Passenger is a great New Orleans novel. It’s a great food novel…For anyone who cares, it’s also a great Knoxville novel—Knoxville being where McCarthy spent most of his childhood. It’s filled with references to his earlier work...A sprawling book of ideas."–Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“A brilliant book… A stunning accomplishment…McCarthy turns his substantial writerly gifts upon two distinct forces: the mechanical and the theoretical. He attends to the exquisite detail of Bobby’s physical world—the sounds and feel of an oil rig in a storm, the touch and clunk of a cigarette machine in a bar, the step-by-step process of removing a bathroom cabinet or digging up and carting off buried treasure…It’s Cormac McCarthy writing as only Cormac McCarthy can.”–Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
“McCarthy has assembled all the chilling ingredients of a locked-room mystery. But he leaps outside the boundaries of that antique form, just as he reworked the apocalypse in The Road… Western knows he’s suspected of something, but he’s not told what. The two men who repeatedly question him never drop their formal politeness—never flash a bolt gun like Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men—but Western knows that his life is in danger and that he must run… The style—a mingling of profound contemplation and rapid-fire dialogue, always without quotation marks and often without attribution—is pure McCarthy.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
What listeners say about The Passenger
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jonathan Quist
- 2023-01-25
McCarthy's best novel yet.
I have read most of McCarthy's books and this one is his greatest triumph. It builds off all of his previous works: the profane perambulations of Suttree, the apocalyptic vision of Blood Meridian, the minimalism of the Border Trilogy, the deliberate but pondering pace of No Country, and the deep insight of the nature of love in The Road.
Where this novel excels over it's predecessors is in the it's crafting of dialogue and character creation. All of the characters, even the minor ones feel like real fleshed out human beings with authentic back stories like in a George Eliot novel.
McCarthy has also mastered his dialogue so that philosophical discourses smack of real conversation in a superior way to even Iris Murdoch. His beautiful tracts of descriptive narrative remain intact here describing everything from the Heartland of America, to the controls of a savage ship, to the Andalusian coastline.
It is McCarthy's Brothers Karamazov.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Amazon Customer
- 2022-11-28
This is no Blood Meridian
I’ve not read the second novel in this series, and do not know how it will augment this novel. But I did not enjoy this nearly as much as Blood Meridian or Suttree. It just seems to be missing that magic I found in listening to those earlier McCarthy tales.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Mike
- 2022-10-28
Cormac McCarthy is poetic
I look forward to the second book in the series because there’s a mystery embedded in the story arc which I need resolution for… Nonetheless I love this book for its poetic eloquence and elegance
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 2023-07-16
Excellent performance
The narrators were excellent and brought a pretty good story to life. Lots of characters were developed though they only had bit parts in the overall story. McCarthy can weave a mundane daily chore/habit into the story line like few others. It wasn’t perfect but I enjoyed the journey.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- MG
- 2023-06-18
Not for me
First listen (or read) of the author. I wish I had read the review I later found that likened this to Beckett, all exposition on various opinions and no plot to speak of. I really dislike that vein of writing; I am not a fan of any of the mid-century existentialist writers. If you like that sort of thing, crack on, but definitely not my cup of tea. Voice work was quite good though.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Tabitha
- 2023-01-11
Confusing
I got halfway through this story and had no idea what it was about. I gave up
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Werden203
- 2023-01-12
this was shockingly boring.
this was so boring. it seemed like it would be great but turned out to be so convoluted and just full of annoying small talk.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!