This is the book of Bobby Western, a brilliant physicist who abandoned a promising career and became a rescue diver. He is constantly haunted by the image of his deceased father (a member of the team that invented the atomic bomb), while the thought of his sister Alicia also causes him great sorrow. When he dives to locate a plane that crashed into the sea and its ten passengers, he only finds nine. From then on, strange things start happening to him: his friends disappear, he is being followed by the FBI, and his bank account is blocked...

Sixteen years after The Road, Cormac McCarthy returns with one of the best works of his career. The Passenger is the first part of a fictional diptych that is completed with Stella Maris.