This week, Cassie McCullagh and Jonathan Green take a look at Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket - a cryptic plunge into paranoia and power, where nothing is quite what it seems. Plus, Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book, a shimmering meditation on the cinema scene in 1970s Italy, and Jeanette Winterson’s One Aladdin Two Lamps, which re-imagines duality and the stories we tell ourselves.

BOOKS

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon (Jonathan Cape)
The Silver Book by Olivia Laing (Hamish Hamilton)
One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeanette Winterson (Penguin Random House)

GUESTS

Huw Griffiths — Associate Professor and Deputy Head of School in English and Writing at the University of Sydney
Claire Mabey — Founder of New Zealand’s literary festival Verb Wellington, books editor at The Spinoff, and author of the award-winning middle-grade novel The Raven's Eye Runaways. Its sequel, The Raven’s Eye Rebellion, is due in April next year.

OTHER BOOKS MENTIONED

Naomi Arnold, Northbound
Nadine Huder, Slowing the Sun
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Seán Hewitt, Open Heaven
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials trilogy - The Rose Field
Ruby Tandoh, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

CREDITS

Presenter, Cassie McCullagh and Jonathan Green
Producer, Cassie McCullagh and Sarah Corbett
Sound engineer, Beth Stewart
Arts editor, Rhiannon Brown

Fiction bending reality in new books by Thomas Pynchon, Olivia Laing and Jeanette Winterson