The Passage

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Before she became the Girl from Nowhere the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

 

The day Amy was born, her mother, Jeanette, was nineteen years old. Jeanette named her baby Amy for her own mother, who d died when Jeanette was little, and gave her the middle name Harper for Harper Lee, the lady who d written To Kill a Mockingbird, Jeanette s favorite book truth be told, the only book she d made it all the way through in high school. She might have named her Scout, after the little girl in the story, because she wanted her little girl to grow up like that, tough and funny and wise, in a way that she, Jeanette, had never managed to be. But Scout was a name for a boy, and she didn t want her daughter to have to go around her whole life explaining something like that.

 

Amy s father was a man who came in one day to the restaurant where Jeanette had waited tables since she turned sixteen, a diner everyone called the Box, because it looked like one: like a big chrome shoe box sitting off the county road, backed by fields of corn and beans, nothing else around for miles except a self-serve car wash, the kind where you had to put coins into the machine and do all the work yourself. The man, whose name was Bill Reynolds, sold combines and harvesters, big things like that, and he was a sweet talker who told Jeanette as she poured his coffee and then later, again and again, how pretty she was, how he liked her coal-black hair and hazel eyes and slender wrists, said it all in a way that sounded like he meant it, not the way boys in school had, as if the words were just something that needed to get said along the way to her letting them do as they liked. He had a big car, a new Pontiac, with a dashboard that glowed like a spaceship and leather seats creamy as butter. She could have loved that man,

Justin Cronin is the New York Times bestselling author of The Passage, The Twelve, The City of Mirrors, Mary and O’Neil (which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize), and The Summer Guest. Other honors for his writing include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Writers’ Award. A Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Rice University, he divides his time between Houston, Texas, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

[A] blockbuster. The New York Times Book Review

Mythic storytelling. San Francisco Chronicle

Magnificent . . . Cronin has taken his literary gifts, and he has weaponized them. . . . The Passage can stand proudly next to Stephen King s apocalyptic masterpiece The Stand, but a closer match would be Cormac McCarthy s The Road: a story about human beings trying to generate new hope in a world from which all hope has long since been burnt. Time

The type of big, engrossing read that will have you leaving the lights on late into the night. The Dallas Morning News

Addictive. Men s Journal

Cronin s unguessable plot and appealing characters will seize your heart and mind. Parade

Cronin has given us what could be the best book of the summer. Don t wait to dive into The Passage. USA Today

Great storytelling . . . vital, tender, and compelling. O: The Oprah Magazine

Cronin gets it just right; the combination of attentive realism and doomsday stakes makes for a mesmerizing experience. Salon

Magnificently unnerving . . . A The Stand-meets-The Road journey. Entertainment Weekly

Imagine Michael Crichton crossbreeding Stephen King s The Stand and Salem s Lot in that lab on Jurassic Park, with rich infusions of Robert McCammon s Swan Song, Battlestar Galactica and even Cormac McCarthy s The Road. The Washington Post