"The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road returns with the second volume of The Passenger series: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. 1972, 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...

Recovering from a difficult childbirth, a woman caring for her newborn alone while her husband travels for work suffers a psychological unraveling that causes her to see the ghost of famed children's book author Margaret Wise Brown. After giving birth to her first child, Megan is raising her newborn alone while her husband travels for work. Physically exhausted and mentally drained, she is also wracked with guilt over her unfinished dissertation--...