The greatest, wildest author of his generation. (Guardian). We could tell you the year is 1944, that the main character is called Tyrone Slothrop and that he has a problem because bombs are falling across Europe and crashing to earth at the exact locations of his sexual conquests. But that doesn't really begin to cover it. Reading this book is like falling down a rabbit hole into an outlandish, sinister, mysterious, absurd, compulsive netherworld. As the Financial Times said, you must forget earlier notions about life and letters and even the Novel. Forty years since publication, Gravity's Rainbow has lost none of its power to enthral.

Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then (as Thomas Pynchon puts it in his sinister, insinuatingly sibilant opening sentence), a screaming comes across the sky, heralding an angel of death, a V-2 rocket. The novel's title, Gravity's Rainbow, refers to the rocket's vapor arc, a cruel dark parody of what God sent Noah to symbolize his promise never to destroy humanity again. Soon Tyrone is on the run from legions of bizarre enemies through the phantasmagoric horrors of Germany. Gravity's Rainbow, however, doesn't follow such a standard plot; one must have faith that each manic episode is connected with the great plot to blow up the world with the ultimate rocket. There is not one story, but a proliferation of characters (Pirate Prentice, Teddy Bloat, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Saure Bummer, and more) and events that tantalize the reader with suggestions of vast patterns only just past our comprehension. Gravity's Rainbow is a blizzard of references to science, history, high culture, and the lowest of jokes.

Vineland, a zone of blessed anarchy in northern California, is the last refuge of hippiedom, a culture devastated by the sobriety epidemic, Reaganomics, and the Tube. Here, in an Orwellian 1984, Zoyd Wheeler and his daughter Prairie search for Prairie's long-lost mother, a Sixties radical who ran off with a narc. Vineland is vintage Pynchon, full of quasi-allegorical characters, elaborate unresolved subplots, corny songs (Floozy with an Uzi), movie spoofs (Pee-wee Herman in The Robert Musil Story), and illicit sex (including a macho variation on the infamous sportscar scene in V.).

This is the first novel by the author of Gravity's Rainbow, and a profoundly impressive and original work in its own right. The search for the mysterious V ranges from New York to Cairo to Alexandria to Malta. Apart from its strange heroine, the book's characters include sailors, spies, priests, philosophers, bums and bawds.