Tree of Smoke

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER

A New York Times Best Book of the Century

“The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson’s.” —Jonathan Franzen

Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor, and more

Denis Johnson’s magnum opus—a visionary, panoramic story of seven years in an impossible war—now with an introduction by Nico Walker.

Tree of Smoke opens in the hours after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, with an eighteen-year-old U.S. Navy seaman shooting a monkey. He doesn’t know why he does it—he’s alone in the jungle—but once he pulls the trigger he begins to sob. It was stupid and wrong, and he can’t undo it.

The sprawling novel that follows is a vision of human folly like nothing else. The result of a lifetime of research, Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson’s study of the Americans who carried out the Vietnam War. It tells the story of two pairs: nephew Skip and uncle Francis Xavier Sands, a new recruit and manic colonel in a fledgling Psy Ops unit, and the unlucky brothers Bill and James Houston, who drift between the Arizona desert and a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has faded away.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Award, Tree of Smoke is an astonishing sketch of American intervention in Southeast Asia from one of our nation’s most brutally honest voices.