Names of Rivers

Set in a 1980s rustbelt town south of Chicago, NAMES OF RIVERS tells the story of Bruno Konick, an aged veteran of ‘the good war’ who has spent a lifetime haunted by his own actions during the liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp; and his grandson Luke, a teenage boy forever dreaming of heroism in a post-Vietnam America. Together, they watch Luke’s father Bruce, an unemployed factory worker badly disfigured during the siege of Khe Sanh, wander towards his suicidal end in a cornfield ruined by a freakish ice storm. When the youngest son Len unexpectedly returns home, recovered from the heroin addiction he acquired as a hospital corpsman in Saigon, he brings with him an old wound that Bruno Konick can never let himself touch. From a variety of perspectives, Buckman examines the complex relationships between fathers and sons, between men and history, weaving a cohesive novel rich in life’s substance.