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

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