Shadow Ticket: Thomas Pynchon’s first novel in over a decade

The US novelist Thomas Pynchon has had “one of the last A-list literary careers”, said Megan Nolan in The Telegraph . His first three novels – “V”, “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Gravity’s Rainbow” – were published to the “kind of rapt audience we all worry doesn’t exist for serious literature today”. Each novel since has been a “major event”. Now aged 88, Pynchon has published what could well be his final work.

A typically zany (and complex) whodunnit, it centres on a private eye in 1930s Milwaukee who is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a cheese heiress – a quest that takes him across the Atlantic, where he encounters “Nazis, Soviets, biker gangs, molls”, and a “good deal of the supernatural”. “If you asked me to relay in precise detail what takes place on every page,” I “w