Book description
Walter Van Brunt is a dreamer, and a lover of drugs, alcohol and speed.
He likes nothing better than to fly along on his motorbike, invincible
and immortal. But one day, dodging a mysterious shadow on the road, he
crashes into a barrier and loses his right foot. Walter is a descendant
of Dutch yeomen and since the day of the accident he has been haunted by
their ghosts. When he receives a new plastic foot he is determined to
find his father who deserted his family years ago, and to uncover the
secrets of his ancestors. 'In rich and sensuous prose, studded like a
mace with knobs of black humour, Boyle invokes the colonial past ... Not
since Thomas Pynchon has any fresh American writer so cunningly lit the
fuses of history so that they detonate in time recently past' The Times
'World's End is one of the most ambitious American novels of recent
years ... a display of wit, narrative power and imaginative empathy for
which most readers will feel, simply, gratitude' USA Today 'T. C. Boyle
has emerged as one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers
of his generation' New York Times 'World's End is set in New York's
Hudson Valley in three well-researched time periods - the
seventeenth-century, the 1940s and the 1960s - but rapidly takes off
from its launchpad and hurls itself into a garrulous world of
exaggeration, manic invention and linguistic aerobatics' Observer
Walter Van Brunt is a dreamer, and a lover of drugs, alcohol and speed.
He likes nothing better than to fly along on his motorbike, invincible
and immortal. But one day, dodging a mysterious shadow on the road, he
crashes into a barrier and loses his right foot. Walter is a descendant
of Dutch yeomen and since the day of the accident he has been haunted by
their ghosts. When he receives a new plastic foot he is determined to
find his father who deserted his family years ago, and to uncover the
secrets of his ancestors.
