WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • In this stunning novel, one man traces the tangled histories of three very different families—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain “Boyle has emerged as one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers of his generation.”— The New York Times   Haunted by the burden of his family’s traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine, and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter Van Brunt is about to have a collision with history.   It will lead Walter to search for his lost father. And it will send the story into the past of the Hudson River Valley, from the 1960s back to the anticommunist riots of the 1940s to the late seventeenth century, where the long-hidden secrets of three families—the aristocratic Van Warts, the Native American Mohonks, and Walter’s own ancestors, the Van Brunts—will be revealed. T. Coraghessan Boyle, author of Water Music , a hilarious reinvention of the exploration of the Niger, returns to his native New York State with this darkly comic historical drama exploring several generations of families in the Hudson River Valley. Walter Van Brunt begins the book with a catastrophic motorcycle accident that sends him back on a historical investigation, eventually encompassing the frontier struggles of the late 1600s. Any book that opens with a three-page "list of principal characters" and includes chapters titled "The Last of the Kitchawanks," "The Dunderberg Imp," and "Hail, Arcadia!" promises a welcome tonic to the self-conscious inwardness of much contemporary fiction; World's End delivers and was rewarded with the PEN/Faulkner Award for 1988. T. C. Boyle  is a novelist and regular contributor to  The New Yorker . His novels include  World’s End  and  The Tortilla Curtain , and he has also published numerous collections of short stories. A Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California, he lives in Santa Barbara.