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.