A definite blessing to the literary world, American novelist Cormac McCarthy is surprisingly set to publish not one but two books this fall after a 16-year hiatus.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced Tuesday that "The Passenger," a long-rumored novel about "morality and science" and "the legacy of sin" that McCarthy reportedly began decades ago, would come out Oct. 25. "Stella Maris," a prequel to "The Passenger" set eight years earlier, is scheduled for Nov. 22. The two works will be available as a box set on Dec. 6.

"We have a plane crash, a trove of gold coins buried deep underground and hidden in copper pipes, a rare Amati violin that vanishes, an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the ocean, and an Italian race car seized by the IRS – an utterly gripping tale," McCarthy's editor at Knopf, Jenny Jackson, said in a statement.

McCarthy, 88, is known for such Western and apocalyptic novels as "The Road," "Blood Meridian" and "No Country for Old Men," which were adapted by the Coen brothers into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. His other honors include a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for "All the Pretty Horses."

McCarthy's 2006 novel "The Road" serves as a prelude for those who haven't met him yet. The novel mentions a father and a son, whose names are never indicated, surviving in a desolated and post-apocalyptic landscape where civilization has disappeared. In McCarthy's grotesque landscape, defined as "barren, silent, godless," the son appears an augur of salvation by way of the Christian ethic and morals. McCarthy's bricks and mortar to create such a novel were the Sept. 11 attacks, commonly referred to as 9/11, that took so many lives in the coordinated attacks on New York's Twin Towers. Besides taking the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, "The Road" was praised in magazines like the New York Review of Books and Entertainment Weekly.