A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Robert Olen Butler · b. 1945 · USA

Why it matters

Vietnamese refugees rebuilding lives in Louisiana narrate their own displaced lives directly, story after story: an elderly loyalist to Ho Chi Minh, a woman convinced of her own reincarnation. Butler's Pulitzer-winning collection renders the Vietnam War's aftermath entirely from the exiled side.

At a glance

Clear first-person voices throughout, though the shifting narrators require attention story to story.