Cormac McCarthy does not return with one, but two new novels

The 88-year-old American writer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his post-apocalyptic novel The road (2006), will be back next fall no less than sixteen years after the publication of his last book.

The American novelist Cormac McCarthy had remained silent since the publication of The road (2006), anticipation novel where a father and a young son try to survive in a devastated world covered in ashes. The road, sold in France to more than 700,000 copies, had also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007 before being brought to the screen by John Hillcoat in 2009, with Viggo Mortensen and the very young Kodi Smit-McPhee – now nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for The Power of the Dog by Jane Campion – in the lead roles. Despite a relatively unprolific career – “only” nine novels since the publication of his first work, The Guardian of the Orchard (Laffont), in 1968 – Cormac McCarthy is still considered one of the great writers of his generation and one of the major representatives of a specifically American literary genre, the “Southern Gothic “.

Cormac McCarthy first became known to the general public in the 1990s with his Borderlands Trilogy (The Border Trilogy), initiated by the novel Such pretty horses (1992) for which he won the National Book Award at the time, one of the most prestigious American literary prizes. His penultimate novel, No, this country is not for the old man (2005)had also been adapted for the cinema, this time by the Coen brothers. No Country for Old Men (2008) then won four Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director(s), Best Supporting Actor (reviewing Javier Bardem’s memorable performance as an icy serial killer) and best adapted scenario. McCarthy also tried his hand at screenwriting, without meeting the expected success, like Cartel (2013) by Ridley Scott.

Alfred A. Knopf, his American publisher, has therefore recently announced the publication of two new novels by Cormac McCarthy to be published next fall, respectively entitled The Passenger and Stella Maris, a philosophical and metaphysical diptych questioning the coexistence of science and religion. The two novels, which will be released in the United States in October and November 2022, take place eight years apart and tell the story of a brother and a sister, Bobby and Alice Western, one and the other by inheritance from their father, a physicist involved in the design of the atomic bomb. McCarthy would have given his publisher the draft of one of these two novels already eight years ago. In France, the two novels will be published by Éditions de l’Olivier in March and May 2023.