Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Tree of Smoke showed every sign of being Denis Johnson's "big book": 600+ pages, years in the making, with a grand subject (the Vietnam War). And in the reading it lives up to every promise. It's crowded with the desperate people, always short of salvation, who are Johnson's specialty, but despite every temptation of the Vietnam dreamscape it is relentlessly sober in its attention to on-the-ground details and the gradations of psychology. Winner: National Book Award. Winner: Pacific Northwest Booksellers Book Award.

This is the story of Skip Sands?spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong?and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.

Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson?s first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date.

About the Author

Denis Johnson is the author of five novels, a collection of poetry and one book of reportage. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer?s Award, among many other honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.