The bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner of "The Road" returns with the second part of a two-volume masterpiece: "Stella Maris" is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, in which a young woman in a psychiatric facility tries to understand her own existence.

In 1972, in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, twenty-year-old Alicia Western checks into the hospital with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag. Alicia, a doctoral student in mathematics at the University of Chicago, has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and does not want to talk about her brother Bobby. Instead, she reflects on the nature of madness and the human urge to share a common experience of the world. She recalls a childhood in which her own grandmother feared for her at the age of seven. She explores the intersection of physics and philosophy and introduces her companions, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. Meanwhile, she mourns Bobby, who is neither completely dead nor entirely hers. "Stella Maris" is entirely told through the transcripts of Alicia's psychiatric sessions and serves as a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to "The Passenger," a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.