Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 novel by the American writer Thomas Pynchon, issued in paperback by Bantam. It shared the 1974 National Book Award for fiction with Isaac Bashevis Singer's A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories.

The book takes place mostly in Europe at the end of the Second World War and is built around the design, manufacture and firing of the V-2 rocket. Its large cast includes American and British intelligence officers, a statistician named Tyrone Slothrop whose sexual history appears to map onto the rocket strikes on London, German engineers, black marketeers and a rocketry specialist on the trail of a device called the Schwarzgeraet, which is due to be fitted to a rocket carrying the serial number 00000. Pynchon moves between high command, occupied cities and the wreckage of the German programme, and the rocket serves as a figure for systems that arrange human beings without any one person intending the result.

The novel is written in a style that shifts constantly between technical report, popular song, parody and plain narrative, and it is one of the books that defined what post-war American fiction could look like.