The Passenger cover art

The Passenger

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Passenger

By: Cormac McCarthy
Narrated by: Julia Whelan, MacLeod Andrews
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

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, The Passenger is a breathtakingly dark novel from Cormac McCarthy, the legendary author of No Country for Old Men and The Road.

‘A gorgeous ruin in the shape of a hardboiled noir thriller . . . What a glorious sunset song’ – The Guardian

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 . . .

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.

One of the final works by Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger is book one in a duology. It is followed by Stella Maris.

©2022 Cormac McCarthy (P)2022 Penguin Randomhouse LLC Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Thriller & Suspense United States World Literature Fiction Heartfelt Mind-bending Aviation Suspense Haunted

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Blood Meridian cover art
The Dog of the South cover art
Suttree cover art
The Orchard Keeper cover art
No Country for Old Men cover art
The Road cover art
Dead on the Island cover art
The Monarch Graveyard cover art
Outer Dark cover art
Breakfast of Champions cover art
The Paper Grail cover art
Of Mice and Minestrone cover art
Deadline cover art
The Donut Legion cover art
Distant Sons cover art
The Morning Star cover art
All stars
Most relevant
The story itself is beautiful and aching and perfect. The prose is perfect. For something so bereft of hope it is gorgeous. Credit to MacLeod Andrews and Julia Whelan for bringing it to life, I shan't be able to imagine either of the Western siblings without their voices next I take this journey.

Perfect in every way.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A tough, voluble, mesmeric novel. There is much here that confounds. And what a great pleasure to be in the lyrical embrace of a novelist who reckons with the confounding of a world, and the strange experiences one can hear among the oratory.

Sublime

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Wonderful book which sweeps from ephemera to engineering, to pain and philosophy, to love to loss and maybe a sort of peace. I have a suspicion it’s not for everyone but I absolutely adored this. A friend of mine didn’t get past the 10th page. Probably says it all. It’s who you are that’s going to depend on what you get out of this book.

Wonderful

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Thought I would try something a bit more demanding but found this really boring. Picked up a little towards the end

Really struggled with this.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
We are lucky to have Cormac McCarthy.
This is a beautiful masterpiece worth the wait.

Perfect

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews