Perfume River

A masterpiece from one of America’s most important contemporary writers, Perfume River is Butler’s magnum opus, an exquisite novel that examines the legacy of the Vietnam War through the portrait of a single North Florida family.

Robert Quinlan is a seventy-year-old historian, teaching at Florida State University, where his wife Darla is also tenured. Their life is a picture of domestic industry: cups of freshly ground coffee fuel Robert’s research and writing during the days, while in the evenings the conversation flows freely over home-cooked dinner and wine. The marriage is a happy enough one, but Robert’s relationship with his father, a veteran of World War II, is strained. William is coming to the end of his life, but reconciliation with his other son Jimmy, whose path diverged from the rest of the family at the outbreak of the Vietnam War, does not seem close at hand. When Robert meets a homeless man whom he takes to be a Vietnam veteran, the past is set to suffuse the present, and the enduring legacy of war on these characters revealed. Profound and poignant, Perfume River is a portrait of family, personal choice, and how war resonates through the American experience.

Robert Olen Butler is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of sixteen novels, includingHell, A Small Hotel, and the Christopher Marlowe Cobb series. He is also the author of six short story collections and a book on the creative process,From Where You Dream. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and received the 2013 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University.