The Deep Green Sea — Robert Olen Butler

“A wrenching love story” about the relationship between a Vietnam veteran and a woman who was orphaned when Saigon fell, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Chicago Tribune).

This is an incandescent tale of modern love between a Vietnamese woman, orphaned in 1975 when Saigon fell to the Communists, and a Vietnam War veteran, returning from America to seek closure for decades-old emotional wounds. The more they nurture the love between them, the more they learn about each other, the more complex and dangerous their relationship becomes -- and what follows conjures classical tragedy, infused with intense eroticism and with Butler's reverence for Vietnamese mythology and history. The Deep Green Sea is a landmark work in the literature of love and war, from the acclaimed author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

“A slim, erotic and fable-like…book that picks up on many of Butler's abiding themes -- the legacy of the Vietnam War, the clash of Vietnam's folklore and mysticism with American manners…[Butler is] a writer working to cast a spell.” -- TheNew York Times Book Review

“In a deceptively understated manner, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler introduces us to a pair of improbable modern lovers . . . [he] plants the seeds of a tragedy that will haunt his readers long after they finish this lyrical love story.” -- People