Above all... there is some quality that is a mixture of craft and integrity, compassion and the masterful effect of the unsaid, that raises this novel to a very high level indeed.

I urge readers to obtain this new and very fine book... I cannot recommend it too highly.

It is a very long time since any book made me physically cry. But Stanley Middleton’s Valley of Decision did just that, twice… The story is simple. Mary is a talented opera singer, married to David, a musician, for three years. She is offered the chance to sing in America in an opera that might just lead to a major career. She takes it and falls in love with her producer. Anyone, well almost anyone, could write that story. But only Mr Middleton could turn it into something approaching a small masterpiece.

Increasingly, Middleton’s command of the ordinary has become extraordinary, in laconic descriptions, and in unflinchingly facing moral imperatives which are always bedded in real, even humdrum, circumstances. And in this new novel the rigours and solaces of making music are cleverly (but uninsistently) counter-pointed with the human relationships that accompany them.

Both an achievement and a promise without limit

[Pynchon’s] eighth novel is something of a return to form, and could well be his best since his comeback… Offers a winning heroine, scintillating screwball dialogue and a typical host of weird, zany or depraved characters, this time corralled into a tighter-than-usual plot.

Entropic in its plottery and joyously paranoid in its world view… My advice: read it, but don’t try to follow it. It’ll make you giddy.

There’s plenty of space within the pattern for Pynchon’s trademark digressions…songs, terrible puns…and some magnificent set pieces.

Though Bleeding Edge doesn’t stint on leftish theorizing about far-right misdeeds, it also gives the sense that for the first time Pynchon is looking at things from a very great height, as a battle between toy soldiers.

The new novel by the reclusive Pynchon is set in New York in 2001 and follows a fraud investigator who takes on more than she bargains for when she checks out a billionaire internet tycoon.

[Pynchon’s] working towards a sort of metaphysics of our accelerated, encrypted world; he’s positing that once you reach a certain bandwidth, classical notions of space and time, and even maybe the unitary indivisible soul, break down.

Routinely extraordinary but also wonderfully funny, regularly gripping and, whisper it, engaging…

Beneath the constant wordplay and manic invention there’s serious intent; the intensity of Pynchon’s prose can be a demanding slog but stay the course and you’ll be rewarded for your efforts.

Pynchon has a particular gift for apprehending a scene, for conveying the resonance of objects and understanding their role in our lives.

The narrative voice of Bleeding Edge is warmer: it’s omniscient and at times essayistic but more often casual, chatty and in the present tense. Pynchon has an almost fatherly fondness for his characters… He takes an obvious pleasure in the game: in his gags and obscurities, in storytelling, and in chronicling the wasted days and nights of a scene that flickered for a few years and then burned out.

Bleeding Edge is an elegiac yet compulsively readable novel. The humour crackles, eliciting chuckles on almost every page. No one works magic with words like Pynchon, and here he is at the height of his powers, by turns gripping, thought-provoking, inventive, touching and poetic, not to mention warmly human.

Pynchon makes interesting observations about life, there are lovely twists of lyricism throughout, the dialogue is punchy and believable, the jokes are funny.

Maxine is a fraud investigator and mother of two in pre-9/11 Manhattan, but a peek into the books of a tech billionaire uncovers – this is a Pynchon novel after all – a vast conspiracy.

But the big surprise of Bleeding Edge is how tender it is. The novel makes an appeal for the survival of innocence in a hostile world. Pynchon wants to find a way out of paranoia and conspiracy, even as he forces the reader deeper into them… The novel really feels like the work of a writer coming to terms with the world. And while he may not like much of what he finds out there, he wants there to be a place for innocence somewhere. As everything falls apart, there's a real yearning in Bleeding Edge for at least some things to hang together.

Enormous fun… Deserves a place alongside Pynchon’s finest works.

Pynchon’s latest novel is a historical romance set in during the internet’s infancy in the spring of 2001.

Bleeding Edge is a romp. On full display are Pynchon’s trademark linguistic and imaginative acrobatics… It may sound frivolous but an emotional maturity counterpoints the silly songs, deliberately bad puns, and pop-cultural references

When he’s in his hardboiled vein, [Pynchon] writes the most entertaining dialogue in any year.

Pynchon's best novel since Mason & Dixon, an exhilarating shaggy-dog private-detective story that punctured its own garrulous charm with sharp stabs of betrayal and threat. Astonishing, too, that that a 76-year-old should produce a novel with such wild and slangy bounce.

Pynchon at his most hilarious, it gave way to more sombre realities involving a suspicious Silicon Alley tech company and its possible links to international terrorism and who knows what else.

Suspenseful and darkly humorous.

Intriguing, and probably the most straightforwardly readable of his books.

A thrilling ride through the first tech bubble, filled with "bleeding edge" technology... Accomplished, funny and digressive.

Pynchon's take on the attack on the Twin Towers. Will he reject the conspiracy theories of the "truthers" or spin some new conspiracies of his own? I think the answer is both. But I wouldn't swear to it.

· Pynchon delivered a piece of typically raggedy brilliance with Bleeding Edge.

Engrossing, hilarious and shocking.

Pynchon’s high-energy writing crackles with dark wit and foreboding

Playful and paranoid New York noir

Readers will have to decide for themselves how they feel about an open-ended mystery, but for those who don’t care so much about the destination, the journey is more than worth it