Sixteen years after his last novel, The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s long-awaited sequel has finally been confirmed, with not one, but two new novels to be published a month apart later this year.
the passenger, in october, and stella maris, in november, follow siblings bobby and alicia western, “who are haunted by the legacy of their father, a physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb,” reported the new york times. times on Tuesday.
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Regarded as one of the greatest living American writers, McCarthy, 88, hasn’t published a novel since he hit the road in 2006. The post-apocalyptic survival story won the Pulitzer Prize and became a bestseller.
It’s an unusually long span for the novelist, who has published 10 novels since 1965. The passenger has been highly anticipated since 2009, when a university in Texas acquired McCarthy’s archive, which included notes for an unfinished novel by that title. provisional; however, the notes were restricted until publication. The acquisition revealed that McCarthy was working on three novels, but there was no update in the decade that followed.
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On Tuesday night, US publisher Knopf revealed that McCarthy would publish the two books in 2022. McCarthy had given a full draft of one of the novels to his publishers eight years ago, kept secret at the publisher.
The Passenger, released October 25, opens as Bobby, a salvage diver working on the Gulf Coast in 1980, explores the wreckage of a sunken plane. he discovers that the black box, the pilot’s bag, and one of the dead passengers are missing. The 400-page novel has “the pace and twists of a thriller” as Bobby is drawn into the mystery of the accident.
stella maris marks the first time mccarthy has focused on a female lead. The 200-page novel, on sale November 22, follows Bobby’s sister Alicia, “a math prodigy whose intellect scares people and whose hallucinations appear as characters, with their own distinctive voices.” /p>
“I had planned on writing about a woman for 50 years,” McCarthy told the Wall Street Journal in a 2009 interview. “I will never be competent enough to do it, but at some point you have to try.”
McCarthy’s editor at Knopf, Jenny Jackson, told the New York Times: “It’s a format for Cormac that allows Alicia to explore her obsessions, which from what I can tell are Cormac’s obsessions. It’s a book. of ideas.”
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When the manuscripts were completed, Knopf considered publishing the books as a single volume, both on the same day and a year apart, but settled on a one-month interval.
“here we have not one, but two novels from america’s greatest living novelist,” said knopf publisher reagan arthur. “how do we publish in a way that gives readers time to experience each one, but also gives readers the satisfaction of experiencing the conversation between the two novels?”
The two novels mark a departure for McCarthy, who has set most of his work in the American South and Southwest, exploring humanity’s capacity for good and evil in austere stories of high violence and depravity. The New York Times reported that McCarthy has been fascinated with mathematics and theoretical physics for years, having surrounded himself with experts in both fields at the Santa Fe Institute, a research institute where he has worked for decades.
Mccarthy, who rarely gives interviews and declined to speak for the ad, is not unaware of the anticipation. When Oprah Winfrey asked her in 2007 if she cared about having millions of readers, she said, “In all honesty, I have to say I really don’t. you’d like people who appreciate the book to read it, but as far as lots and lots of people reading it, so what?”
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