''Stella Maris'' is a 2022 novel by American writer

Cormac McCarthy Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., July 20, 1933) is an American writer who has written twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays and three short stories, spanning the Western and post-apocalyptic genres. He is known for his gr ...

that was published on December 6, 2022. It is a companion novel to '' The Passenger''. It was the final novel published before his death on June 13, 2023.

Plot

The novel follows Alicia Western, a math prodigy conflicted by her father's contributions to the American development of the

atomic bomb A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...

. The entire novel is set in 1972 in

Black River Falls, Wisconsin , settlement_type = City , nickname = , motto = , image_skyline = Black River Falls Wisconsin Downtown2 WIS54.jpg , imagesize = , image_caption = Looking west at ...

, at the titular Stella Maris, "a non-denominational facility and hospice for the care of psychiatric medical patients," as stated on page 3 (the only page that is not written in dialogue). The novel consists of a "series of conversations between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, written like a play but with no exposition, stage directions, or dialogue tags. The subjects include mathematics, quantum mechanics, music theory, and obscure philosophy."

Development

In a 2009 interview, McCarthy said that he had been "planning on writing about a woman for 50 years".

Publication

Announced in March 2022, ''Stella Maris'' was published by Knopf on December 6, 2022, one month after its companion novel '' The Passenger''.

References

2022 American novels Novels by Cormac McCarthy Sequel novels Novels set in the 1970s Fiction set in 1972 Novels set in Wisconsin Novels set in psychiatric hospitals {{2020s-novel-stub