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The Passenger

Written by: Cormac McCarthy
Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews, Julia Whelan
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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.

©2022 Cormac McCarthy (P)2022 Random House Audio
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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

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

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.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

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.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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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

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    4 out of 5 stars
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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.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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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.

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Confusing

I got halfway through this story and had no idea what it was about. I gave up

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

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.

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