About The Book

In The Deep Green Sea, Robert Olen Butler has created 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, and 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.

Praise

“What makes The Deep Green Sea a strikingly lively experience is its adherence to classical tragedy, enriched with Butler’s fragrant and sensuous attention to detail . . . His written word swells with human feelings, and the spiteful precision of fate. Immerse yourself.” —Time Out

“A slim, erotic and fable-like novel . . . 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.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[Robert Olen Butler] is our poet of the Vietnam experience, our Sophocles, and The Deep Green Sea is a drama about . . . how much must be suffered before we become wise.” —Men’s Journal

“In a deceptively understated manner, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler . . . plants the seeds of a tragedy that will haunt his readers long after they finish this lyrical love story.” —People