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  • Published: 7 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529972047
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

Shadow Ticket




A private eye is catapulted on to a riotous and continent-hopping journey that proves difficult to escape – the new novel from the visionary storyteller.

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labour-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a onetime strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement – and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing.

By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, 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.

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.

  • Published: 7 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529972047
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

About the author

Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason and Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice and, most recently, Bleeding Edge. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

Also by Thomas Pynchon

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Praise for 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