Shadow Ticket

The greatest, wildest author of his generation

Ian Rankin, Guardian

One of America’s great writers

Salman Rushdie, New York Times Book Review

His fiction is comic, broad, and frequently surreal, but its underlying aim is nothing less than to represent ourselves to ourselves . . . Pynchon’s books, for all their wizardry and social and political insight, are fun . . . Once you’re in, you won’t want to get out

O, The Oprah Magazine

The American great returns . . . It’s the Great Depression, and private eye Hicks McTaggart takes on a routine case that turns out to be anything but: think spies, swing musicians, interplanetary languages and paranormal intrigue

Guardian, Biggest Books of the Autumn

A towering literary giant

GQ

Private eye Hicks McTaggart navigat[es] a world of swing bands, spies and surreal danger. A wild, genre-mashing ride from an elusive literary mind

i Paper

Pynchon’s gift has always been his ability to render America in its full strangeness . . . The book is full of exuberance. Pynchon’s sentences themselves are so alive, so pleasurable . . . The fact that Shadow Ticket is brilliant and prescient isn’t a surprise; that it exudes so much joy and sensuousness is

Megan Nolan, Daily Telegraph

A living literary legend returns with a masterpiece. Featuring private eyes, Nazis and Soviets, Shadow Ticket reads like a vintage tale of adventure

Daily Telegraph

Grab[s] you by the collar . . . Remember his genre parodies, his outrageous names (howdy, Zoltán von Kiss), his ornate zingers, his lollygagging but frequently hilarious descriptions? It’s all here in this supercharged noir – a Chandleresque yarn involving a missing heiress and a disaster-prone private eye

New York Times, 27 Books Coming in October

Irresistible and deeply satisfying, this makes clear Pynchon’s powers remain undiminished

Publishers Weekly

A 1930s detective tale with a sucker punch ending . . . Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, Shadow Ticket capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance – and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open

Los Angeles Times

Brilliant fun . . . Rollicking . . . Pynchon’s prose is still as balletically dazzling as the trick shot Lew teaches Hicks . . . It’s not just that no one else writes quite like Pynchon; it’s that no one even tries

Washington Post

Pynchon’s livewire prose hops from subject to subject, joins the dots and makes patterns . . . [The novel] sets out with a song in its heart and mischievous spring in its step, but it edges into darkness

Guardian

Shadow Ticket is pleasingly twisty and packed with snappy repartee

Literary Review

Shadow Ticket exists in a glorious state of flux – the shadow of what, a ticket to where?... the tale flits through a dreamy wonderland that invokes unreliable memories of every Hammett, every Chandler, every film noir ever made… Happily, worryingly, Shadow Ticket is a hoot

Uncut

A noir caper novel… This is Pynchon at his very best

Foyles

All the colours of the Pynchon rainbow… a swaggering, hard-boiled caper set in a 1930s US toying with fascism

Financial Times

A literary triumph . . . I’m delighted to report that Shadow Ticket is a gloriously language-driven detective novel that waits for no one

Boston Globe

Pynchon-heads, this one’s for us . . . His most urgent novel yet . . . Despite the intensity of his subject matter, Pynchon remains hilarious

Vulture

Shadow Ticket is brisker than Thomas Pynchon’s other work, but it’s full of his usual vaudevillian sensibility, and it addresses his favorite theme: how to live freely under powerful systems of control

New York Review of Books

Bombs, xenophobic spies, champagne cocktails, motorcycle gangs, jazz critics, and cult leaders abound . . . It’s impossible not to project the parallels of the creeping fascism in 1930s America in Shadow Ticket onto our current political climate . . . Pynchon knows how to drive his readers towards deluded suspicion. No one is free from paranoia when the world descends into chaos

GQ

A swaggering, hard-boiled caper . . . This is Pynchon’s genius: what seems ridiculous at first glance might just also be a faithful rendering of earnest American culture

Financial Times

Many of Shadow Ticket’s pleasures come from immersion in its period . . . But most impressive is the language, a mix of authentic slang and Pynchon’s own coinages that makes every page a joy and just demands to be noted and recited

4Columns

A long-running theme in Pynchon’s work as a whole – how we’ve ended up where we are – as he has traced modern history . . . It’s Pynchon’s portrayal of human relationships that really shines in Shadow Ticket . . . Shadow Ticket’s final pages seem to be saying that even after all the grand events happening on the world stage, it all comes back to simple human relationships and the everyday hopes and dreams of the young

Quietus