Will I love Stella Maris?

This is a companion novel to The Passenger, and consists entirely of a nearly 200-page dialogue between Alicia Western, a brilliant (and floridly hallucinating) young mathematician living on the razor's edge of madness, and "Dr. Cohen," the stolid psychiatrist tasked with understanding and treating her in the novel's eponymous psychiatric hospital to which Alicia has voluntarily committed herself. Temporally, the novel takes place before the events of The Passenger begin, and so serves as a kind of prequel to Alicia's brother Bobby's story, although the novels intertwine in a way that suggests they probably began life as a single door-stopper… show more.

McCarthy was perhaps the greatest living American writer until his passing on June 13, 2023. Born in 1933, he published Stella Maris in December 2022, which was his final work and a companion piece to The Passenger, released just six weeks prior.

Stella Maris is a brief work composed entirely of dialogue between Alicia Western—"a twenty-year-old Jewish-Caucasian female. Attractive, possibly anorexic. She arrived at the facility six days ago, seemingly by bus and without luggage"—and her therapist. Their discussions span topics from her life and traumas to the foundations of mathematics, Los Alamos, solipsism, Platonism, and Amati violins,… show more.