The Crying of Lot 49

Oedipa Maas has been made executrix of her former lover’s estate.

The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oedipa in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting the crying of lot 49.

Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 is by far the shortest of Pynchon’s great, dazzling novels – and one of his most iconic.

‘The best American novel I have read since the war’ Frank Kermode

‘Remarkable… The Crying of Lot 49 resembles metaphysical poetry in the range of its allusions and the curiosity of its creator’ Washington Post