An October Surprise: Thomas Pynchon’s New Novel “Shadow Ticket” – Oct 7, 2025

Twelve years after his previous novel, Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon will be unleashing his ninth novel, Shadow Ticket. The publication date is October 7, 2025. Coming in at 384 pages, it will be a tad longer than his 2009 novel Inherent Vice.

From Penguin Press’s press-release description it seems Shadow Ticket follows what has become a favorite Pynchon plotline: a detective who gets entangled in something much higher than his pay grade, including shady characters, damsels in distress, paranoia, and mystics.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Shadow Ticket is a sort of “placeholder” while he pounds away at a much larger and ambitious tome, but who knows?

Also, like previous Pynchon novels, the description appears to have been written by Pynchon himself (according to the New York Times, this was confirmed by Penguin):

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 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.