A New York Times Bestseller • A New York Times, Washington Post, and Associated Press Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by The Los Angeles Times, Vulture, TIME, The Guardian, The New Republic, and LitHub The new novel from Thomas Pynchon, author of Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice. “A masterpiece.” —The Telegraph “Bonkers and brilliant fun.” —The Washington Post “Late Pynchon at his finest. 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.” —The Los Angeles Times 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 labor-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.

Votes on Shadow Ticket were mixed between slightly above average to great and much of the conversation explored what led us to this difference. The first impression from many was that Pynchon was being deliberately difficult with his use of tangents, in media res scenes, and unexplained slang and localisms. Shadow Ticket is very much grounded in a pre-WWII Depression era Wisconsin and Europe and, in typical Pynchon fashion, the story ranged through a downpour of different characters and plots, many of which seemed to be invoked just for a quick joke. This frustrated much of the room as it made the novel hard to follow and interpret. That said, the funny moments were genuinely funny and all of us could find a couple of passages that made us laugh out loud. Pynchon also managed to weave a strong theme through his chaos. Looking at the rise of Nazism during that time period, Pynchon's protagonist Hicks is a stand-in for much of our lived experience in 2026, witnessing a changing world that is getting worse and you slowly realize you need to accept and do something about. Even random moments in the book harken back to the coming of a cruel stupidity, an exchange of fun criminality and risk for true danger and evil, and a wistful realization that the old world was better than you thought but already gone. Once that thread was elucidated, opinions on the book changed. The less-enamored NUBClubbers didn't like the book more, but they appreciated it and could see how people who enjoyed Pynchon's speed and zaniness would really like Shadow Ticket. If nothing else, Pynchon has captured the spirit of this moment in all of its deflating glory. We are recommending this book, but only if reading a globe-trotting, breathless string of jokes in 1930s slang is something that sounds like fun to you.