biNEW YORK TIMESi BEST SELLER b- Tbhe second volume of The Passenger series, from bThe Pulitzer Prize-winning author of iThe Roadi b- Anbb intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence.br bbrbiiThe richest and strongest work of McCarthy's career...An achievement greater than iBlood Meridiani...or...iThe Roadi. --iThe Atlanticib p1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy and she introduces h