The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel by the American writer Thomas Pynchon. It was published by J. B. Lippincott on 27 April 1966, and it is the shortest of his novels.

Oedipa Maas is a young Californian woman who lives a comfortable life in a small town with her husband Mucho, a radio presenter. When her former lover, the wealthy Pierce Inverarity, dies, she discovers that she has been named as the executor of his estate.

Working through his affairs she begins to suspect that there is a connection between him and an old quarrel between two postal companies, and that the evidence is all around her if she can only read it. The novel follows her as she tries to establish whether she has found something or invented it.

One of the companies, Thurn and Taxis, really existed: it was a private postal firm that operated from 1806 to 1867. The book is usually described as a postmodernist novel, and Time magazine included it in its list of the hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.