Against the Day

A fine example of a successful marriage between the popular and intellectual, between fiction and science... gloriously, demandingly, daringly, Pynchon has rediscovered vulgarity and continues to prove the novel has never been more vibrant, more various or better able to represent our complex world. Give this book your time - you'll agree its worth it

Michael Moorcock, Daily Telegraph

Against the Day is a rollercoaster ride that soars, plummets and often loops the loop.... A fantastic chronicle of how the world came into being... there is a beautifully humane, compassionate energy arcing through the book...Pynchon is the only living American author who unreservedly deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature

Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday

It is a serious book and the finest thing Pynchon has done since Gravity's Rainbow. It should be acknowledged, nonetheless that Against The Day is immensely funny, an intricate, wheezing shaggy dog joke holds you in its grip for a thousand pages. Quite a feat

Tom Adair, Scotsman

It is brilliant...There's a wonderful gathering tenderness - and Pynchon writes some of the most beautiful sentences you are ever likely to come across

Spectator

Expertly spoofing Victorian pulp and western dime novels, as well as paying tribute to more contemporary genres..the tone is pitched a a generally jaunty angle to the apocalyptic subject matter, and whatever drawbacks of this it certainly keeps the book moving at a good clip

James Lasdun, Guardian

Heart-stopping felicities of description lurk around every corner

Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday

Pynchon can be totally maddening, but he has a great sense of mischief

Douglas Kennedy, The Times

Clever and inventive in a mad professor kind of way...Intermittently warmed by paragraph-long sunbeams of iridescent prose-poetry

Economist

Now aged 70 [Pynchon's] astonishing sense of place is undiminished...That such a heavy book should bear such a light-hearted message is one final irony - yet another example of Pynchon's wayward brilliance

Mark Sanderson, Sunday Telegraph

A fast elasticism running from slangy to stately, a voice full of echoes, littered with jokes and songs, and often reaching into a curious tenderness, a tone of laid back elegy.... this amazing writer continues to be amazing, and in much the same way he always was

London Review of Books

The greatest, wildest author of his generation

Ian Rankin, Guardian