Justin Cronin developed the idea for The Passage over a three month period during which he jogged alongside his nine year old daughter Iris, who was riding her bicycle to get fit for soccer season. She felt that his previous novels were 'boring' and requested that he write a book in which a nine year old girl saves the world. From these tentative roots, Cronin developed the plot that would eventually result in an epic dystopian trilogy spanning nine hundred years.
Born in 1962 in New England, Cronin graduated from Harvard University and went on to teach English at La Salle University and later at Rice University. He is married with two children, a boy and a girl, and resides in Houston, Texas. Now a full-time writer, Cronin has won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for his novel Mary and O'Neil, the Stephen Crane Prize, and a Whiting Award in 2002. Apart from the Passage Trilogy and Mary and O'Neil, Cronin has also written The Summer Guest, a multi-faceted exploration of the poignancy of impending death.
The Passage was named one of the ten best novels of the year by Time Magazine and one of the best books of the year by, among others, The Washington Post, Esquire, and Library Journal.
The Passage is a veritable tome, running to almost one thousand pages. Set in 2016, in a world where war both at home and abroad has reduced America to a shadow of its former self, a classified military plan, entitled Project Noah, goes horridly awry. A wave of destruction is loosed upon the unsuspecting citizens and sets in motion one of the most detailed and absorbing accounts of post-apocalyptic life in recent times.
