Thomas Pynchon returns with 'Shadow Ticket', a novel about the swinging age

A month before his 88th birthday, Thomas Pynchon announces his next novel after a 12-year silence. It is titled Shadow Ticket and is due on 7 October, according to Penguin Random House publishers.

The book, set in Milwaukee in 1932, announces itself as an alternative history of the Great Depression years masquerading as a genre novel. A 'Pynchon-esque' sort of thing. The protagonist is Hicks McTaggart, a former scab turned private investigator who thinks he has finally found a secure job but what should be a routine case - locating and bringing back a wealthy Wisconsin heiress who has left the fold - leads him to embark for Hungary.

Eventually, he finds himself entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British spies, swing musicians, paranormal practitioners and outlaw bikers. "The only silver lining for Hicks is that it's the dawn of the big band era and he happens to be a pretty good dancer," reads the description of provided by Penguin Random House. "Whether that will be enough to allow him to return to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another matter."

Shadow Ticket will be the tenth book by the American novelist who lives as a recluse - he does not give interviews and does not want to be photographed - and is considered among the greatest exponents of postmodernism. Like his previous Shape Detention (2009) and The Crest of the Wave (2013), this new work also deals with noir. Pynchon, who made a name for himself in 1963 with V., is best known for his 1973 work The Rainbow of Gravity, considered by some to be the greatest American novel of the post-war period. To others, it is incomprehensible. At least as much as the practice of barricading himself in his house, sleeping during the day and writing at night that he has observed since he began his career as a storyteller. But as he himself said in response to an interview: "Why should I be easy to understand?"