The Passenger

<p><b>A sunken jet, a missing body, and a salvage diver entering a conspiracy beyond all understanding. From the bar rooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, <i>The Passenger</i> is a breathtakingly dark novel from Cormac McCarthy, the legendary author of <i>No Country for Old Men</i> and <i>The Road</i>.<br> <br> 'A gorgeous ruin in the shape of a hardboiled noir thriller . . . What a glorious sunset song' - <i>The Guardian</i></b><br> <br> 1980, Mississippi. It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges into the darkness of the ocean. His dive light illuminates a 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 . . .<br> <br> Now a collateral witness to this disappearance, Bobby is discouraged from speaking of what he has seen. He is a man haunted: 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.<br> <br> <b>One of the final works by Cormac McCarthy, <i>The Passenger</i> is book one in a duology. It is followed by <i>Stella Maris</i>.</b><br> <br> Praise for Cormac McCarthy:<br> <br> 'McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute' - Anne Enright, author of <i>The Green Road</i><br> <br> 'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' - Stephen King, author of <i>The Shining</i><br> <br> '[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' - Annie Proulx, author of <i>Brokeback Mountain</i></p>