Gravity's Rainbow

Set in London and across a ruined Europe in the final months of the Second World War and the weeks after it, Thomas Pynchon's third novel follows Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant whose private history seems to predict where German V-2 rockets will fall. That strange pattern draws the attention of Allied intelligence officers, scientists and spies, and soon Slothrop is on the run through a shifting, lawless territory the novel calls the Zone, chasing rumors of a mysterious rocket and the secret of his own past. Around him swirl hundreds of characters, songs, jokes, dreams and digressions on chemistry, cartels, film and paranoia. Long, dense and often bawdy, the book won the 1974 National Book Award for fiction and remains one of the most debated American novels of the twentieth century. It is written for patient adult readers who enjoy ambitious, demanding literary fiction.