Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Denis Johnson

With a nod to classic WW II stories like Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, National Book Award winner Johnson (Jesus's Son), switches gears from tightly-written short novels to an epic of the Vietnam War — while keeping his darkly comic eye.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER.

One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year.

"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, ChicagoTribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor. . .

Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA—engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."