I pushed through and read Stella Maris, the companion novel to The Passenger, because it looked like a quick read due to its page count and the fact that it was all dialogue. The novel focuses on a series of conversation between Alicia Western, mathematics prodigy and sister of The Passenger’s protagonist Bobby Western, and her therapist. Alicia has checked herself into an institution where she had previously been involuntarily admitted. Her brother is in a foreign hospital in a coma and his chances aren’t […]

With all due respect to the recently departed, I have no idea what this book was about. I don’t know if there was a story at all. I know there was one character who started out as a deep-sea diver who got involved with a suspicious plane crash, but instead of investigating that crash he just seemed to have a bunch of tortured conversations with drunks and other people at the margins of society. Apparently our main character was both a former physics student and […]