World's End (Boyle novel)

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World's End
T c boyle worlds end.jpg
1st US edition cover
Author T. C. Boyle
LanguageEnglish
Publisher Viking Press
Publication date
October 8, 1987
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Pages456 pp (first edition, hardcover)
ISBN 0-670-81489-X (first edition, hardcover)
OCLC 15366191
813/.54 19
LC Class PS3552.O932 W67 1987

World's End is a 1987 historical fiction novel by T. C. Boyle. The novel, characterized by dark satire, tells the story of several generations of families in the Hudson River Valley. It was the winner of the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction.

Contents

Summary

Haunted by his family’s traitorous legacy and dazed by pot, cheap wine, sex, and a disturbingly real brush with ancestral ghosts, Walter Van Brunt is about to crash headlong into history.

This journey will push him to search for his missing father and carry the story deep into the Hudson River Valley’s past, moving from the 1960s to the anticommunist unrest of the 1940s, and finally to the late seventeenth century, where long-buried secrets of three intertwined families - the noble Van Warts, the Mohonk people, and Walter’s own Van Brunt ancestors - come to light.

Book information

World's End by T. C. Boyle

The book was referenced in the popular American sitcom How I Met Your Mother , in the season 5 episode "Girls Vs. Suits".