Gene Wolfe's Return to the Whorl is the third volume, after On Blue's
Waters and In Green's Jungles, of his ambitious SF trilogy The Book
of the Short Sun.
It is again narrated by Horn, who has embarked on a quest in search of
the heroic leader Patera Silk. Horn has traveled from his home on the
planet Blue, reached the mysterious planet Green, and visited the great
starship, the Whorl, and even, somehow, the distant planet Urth. But
Horn's identity has become ambiguous, a complex question embedded in the
story, whose telling is itself complex, shifting from place to place,
present to past. Perhaps Horn and Silk are now one being.
Return to the Whorl brings Wolfe's major new fiction, The Book of the
Short Sun, to a strange and seductive climax.