This is the book of twenty-year-old Alicia Western, a rare genius in mathematics, who voluntarily admits herself to the Stella Maris psychiatric clinic with $40,000 in a plastic bag. In her sessions with the psychiatrist, they discuss the essential issues of her life: mathematics, philosophy, music, God, death, the question of truth, and her brother Bobby Western.

Stella Maris, the second part of the novel diptych that began with The Passenger (Aldina/59), completes the grand return of the leading living American author Cormac McCarthy.