World's End — T.C. Boyle / T. Coraghessan Boyle

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 late 1960s, back to the anticommunist riots of the 1940s, to the late seventeenth century -- there to reveal the long-hidden secrets of three families: the aristocratic Van Warts, the Native-American Mohonks, and Walter's own plebeian ancestors, the Van Brunts.