Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Denis Johnson

Winner of the National Book Award

"I can't be sure that there's been a better American novel published in the past ten years. It is a masterpiece." --The Miami Herald

Named a best book of the year by The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, Salon.com, Slate.com, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor

Tree of Smoke is Dennis Johnson's masterpiece, a visionary, panoramic story of seven years in an impossible war. It moves between the story of William "Skip" Sands, a soldier engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong, and Bill and James Houston, two young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into all the chaos of Vietnam. In its vision of human folly, this is a story like nothing in our literature, "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).