From a New York Times story by Alexandra Alter headlined “Sixteen Years After ‘The Road,’ Cormac McCarthy Is Publishing Two New Novels”:

During a rare appearance in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2015, Cormac McCarthy offered a tantalizing glimpse of his work in progress: “The Passenger,” a novel that explored esoteric ideas about math, physics and the nature of consciousness.

Readers have been eager for the novel ever since. Widely revered as one of the greatest living American writers, McCarthy has not published a novel since 2006, when he released “The Road,” a post-apocalyptic survival story that won the Pulitzer Prize and became a best seller.