Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From one of America's most important writers, Perfume River is an exquisite novel that examines family ties and 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 marriage, forged in the fervor of anti-Vietnam-war protests, now bears the fractures of time, both personal and historical, with the couple trapped in an existence of morning coffee and solitary jogging and separate offices. For Robert and Darla, the cracks remain under the surface, whereas the divisions in Robert's own family are more apparent: he has almost no relationship with his brother Jimmy, who became estranged from the family as the Vietnam War intensified. Robert and Jimmy's father, a veteran of WWII, is coming to the end of his life, and aftershocks of war ripple across their lives once again, when Jimmy refuses to appear at his father's bedside. And an unstable homeless man whom Robert at first takes to be a fellow Vietnam veteran turns out to have a deep impact not just on Robert, but on his entire family.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This latest from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Butler (A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain) astutely reveals the Vietnam War's continuing impact on America through two families: that of protagonist Robert Quinlan, who served in Vietnam to please a World War II-proud father estranged from his second son, war protester Jimmy, and that of Bob, a homeless man haunted by his violent father, himself troubled by Vietnam. -Robert, whose marriage is strained, had a desk job during the war and remains conscience-stricken owing to a single act of brutality he cannot bring himself to discuss. (Vietnam has left him with other, more personal secrets as well.) Perhaps that explains why he befriends Bob, whom he initially believes to be a Vietnam veteran. The increasingly unstable Bob figures largely in the narrative after the death of Robert's father, even as Robert is further ground down by his father's dying revelations. Meanwhile, Jimmy, who fled to Canada in the Sixties and remains there, resolutely out of touch with his family, suddenly has choices of his own to make. By the end of this pristinely written novel, we come to see what war does to everyone. -VERDICT A complex story told with poignancy and an economy of means; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 3/14/16.]-Barbara -Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Butler's assured, elegant novel explores a family fractured by the Vietnam War as its members face the losses of age. In 1967, Robert Quinlan enlists, hoping to secure a noncombatant role in Vietnam, while his younger brother, Jimmy, cuts family ties after his father violently rebukes his antiwar stance. While dining out in Tallahassee, Fla., 47 years later, Robert-now 70 and a university professor-meets a mentally ill homeless man, also named Bob, whom he takes for a Vietnam veteran. He is wrong, but the encounter reawakens memories of the Tet Offensive, when a split-second decision burdened Robert with secrets and guilt. The day after the encounter, Robert's father, William, shatters his hip, and Jimmy, a resident of Canada since his flight to avoid the draft, is told of William's uncertain prognosis. As the brothers and those around them face the possibility of a reunion, they look at their relationships anew; meanwhile, an increasingly delusional Bob crosses paths with the family again. The novel has obvious links to Butler's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, but its characters struggle to adapt to the dislocations caused not by war or geography but by time. Eddying fluidly through its half-century span, the book speaks eloquently of the way the past bleeds into the present, history reverberates through individual lives, and mortality challenges our perceptions of ourselves and others. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Associates. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Life has a way of slipping by when we're not looking. Secrets stay hidden, slowly eroding the truth between people, and then, again and again, we fail to act, further solidifying the barriers that keep us from one another and from ourselves. So it is in Butler's latest novel, a deeply meditative reflection on aging and love, as seen through the prism of one family quietly torn asunder by the lingering effects of the Vietnam War. Robert is a 70-year-old academic, and his wife, Darla, also a professor, is 67; over decades, their lives have drifted into the sameness of routine, intimacy inadvertently discarded like old skin. Robert is a Vietnam vet, but his experience in the war and his secrecy about what happened to him there as well as unresolved questions about his motivation for enlisting continue to haunt him, as do his troubled relationships with his father, who dies just as the story begins, and his brother, who evaded the draft and has lived in Canada ever since. Years of secrecy and avoidance come to a head in the course of the novel, with a homeless man whom Robert encounters in a restaurant providing the catalyst. Butler, returning to contemporary literary fiction after three outstanding historical thrillers, shows again that he is a master of tone, mood, and character, whatever genre he chooses to explore. This is thoughtful, introspective fiction of the highest caliber, but it carries a definite edge, thanks to an insistent backbeat that generates suspense with the subtlest of brushstrokes.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2016 Booklist