Thomas Pynchon announces new novel Shadow Ticket, his first in 12 years

Penguin Random House has announced that they are to publish Thomas Pynchon’s first new novel in 12 years this October.

Shadow Ticket will be the reclusive, 87-year-old author’s tenth book, and like the previous two, it tells a noir detective story.

According to an official description provided by the publishers, the novel is set in Milwaukee in 1932 during the Great Depression, with the “repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen” and “the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind.”

The synopsis continues: “Hicks McTaggart, a one-time 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.”

Pynchon was born in 1937 and is considered one of the greatest living novelists. He published his first book, the postmodern satire V., in 1963. His reputation rose with his subsequent acclaimed novels The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Despite his fame, he has carefully avoided public appearances, and only a handful of photographs of him are known to exist.

His two most recent works have both been detective stories: 2009’蝉 Inherent Vice, which was set in 1970, and 2013’蝉 Bleeding Edge, a contemporary novel that addressed 9/11 and the rise of the internet.

Inherent Vice was adapted for the screen in 2014 by Paul Thomas Anderson, an avowed fan of the novelist’s work. Anderson’s forthcoming film One Battle After Another is thought to be heavily influenced by Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland.

Shadow Ticket will be published on October 7 by Penguin Press in the U.S. and by Jonathan Cape in the UK.