Thomas Pynchon has written his first novel in more than a decade, publisher Penguin Random House (PRH) has announced.
Shadow Ticket, due out in October, will be the American novelist’s 10th book. Like his previous two, Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), this new work is a noir novel about a private eye.
Set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin during the Great Depression, Shadow Ticket follows Hicks McTaggart, a detective who is tasked with finding the heiress of a cheese fortune. He eventually ends up in Hungary, and finds himself entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British spies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal and outlaw motorcyclists.
“The only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the big band era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer,” reads Shadow Ticket’s description on PRH’s website. “Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.”
The 87-year-old author is best known for his 1973 magnum opus Gravity’s Rainbow, which some critics have called the greatest postwar American novel. He has covered all sorts of themes in his work, from music to mathematics, often exploring conspiracy theories and paranoia.
Pynchon has mostly eschewed press attention ever since his postmodern debut V became a bestseller after its publication in 1963, covering windows with black sheets, writing all night and sleeping all day. After a camera crew recorded him in Manhattan in 1997 he called CNN to protest. “Let me be unambiguous,” he said. “I prefer not to be photographed.”
Shadow Ticket will be published on 7 October by Penguin Press in the US, and Jonathan Cape in the UK.
