The Passenger

An appealing piece of work . . . gripping, with plenty of reflection and evocation * The Daily Telegraph * The Passenger is like a submerged ship itself; a gorgeous ruin in the shape of a hardboiled noir thriller . . . What a glorious sunset song . . . It’s rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic * The Guardian * A moving and characteristically disconcerting addition to the oeuvre of one of America’s greatest writers * The Irish Times * Critics have detected the influence on him of Faulkner and Hemingway, but this is to understate his achievement. The Passenger shows that McCarthy belongs in the company of Melville and Dostoevsky, writers the world will never cease to need * New Statesman * [A] gripping story, written in McCarthy’s trademark acerbic style * i newspaper * Kafka on the bayou * Observer * Magisterial * Financial Times * McCarthy’s formidable talents for dialogue, perfect sentences and descriptions of the natural world remain undiminished * The Times * The Passenger also happens to be something of a masterpiece… It is [McCarthy’s] most ambitious work. * TIME * The novels McCarthy published in 2022, at the age of 89, permanently resolve the question of whether McCarthy is a great novelist… together the books are the richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career * The Atlantic * An intellectual experience that’s not quite like anything else out there, laced with the eerie beauty that only Cormac McCarthy can offer. * Vox * In Stella Maris and The Passenger, McCarthy invites us to consider hopelessness not just to give us hope but to compel us to make use of it. Having lived for nearly 100 years, he has given us what may well be the last great novels of the long 20th century. He may also help point us in a different direction for the twenty-first. * The Nation *