'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