Shadow Ticket
The exhilarating and powerful New York Times bestseller
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
A private eye is catapulted on to a continent-hopping journey that proves difficult to escape.
‘A masterpiece… A vintage tale of adventure’ Daily Telegraph
‘Swing bands, spies and surreal danger… A wild ride’ i Paper
‘Brilliant fun… Rollicking’ Washington Post
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.
‘Late Pynchon at his finest’ Los Angeles Times
‘So alive, so pleasurable’ Megan Nolan
‘Grabs you by the collar’ New York Times
*A Guardian, Financial Times and Daily Telegraph Book of the Year*
*Daily Mail Notable Book of 2025 and i paper Best Crime and Thriller Book of the Year*
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With his casually playful and chillingly resonant ninth novel, Pynchon (Bleeding Edge) delivers a warning against global fascism, a slapstick symphony whose antic comedy can't begin to conceal its hopelessly broken American heart. It begins as a 1930s gangster story, focusing on Hicks McTaggart, an honest but hungry detective on the hunt for Wisconsin cheese heiress Daphne Airmont, who may well have disappeared into "pasturelands so far away the cows go oom." Known around Milwaukee for his rumpled honor and general romantic haplessness, Hicks trails Daphne to Hungary, where a foreign correspondent named Slide ominously warns that "the smart money is on war." A surreal motorcycle race around Central Europe ensues, including a daring pig rescue that ends with the freed porker in a sidecar, "done up in helmet and goggles, beaming, posing like a princess in a limousine." Ultimately, the homesick Hicks wonders whether there's no going back. Belying his reputation as an intimidating genius of weighty ideas and unresolved plots, Pynchon is simply telling it like it is: life is crushing, and nothing's ever over. The novel's heart-freezing finish is as plaintively moving as anything he's ever done. Irresistible and deeply satisfying, this makes clear Pynchon's powers remain undiminished.
