Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

Tree of Smoke is Johnson at his largest: a sprawling Vietnam novel full of soldiers, spies, conflicting stories and people trying to impose some kind of order on a world that refuses to cooperate. Colonel Sands, one of its central figures, is obsessed with psychological warfare and with understanding an alien reality well enough to control it.

The cover comes from a small scene late in the book. Sands stops beside a road in a landscape where jungle and rice fields have been reduced to poisoned rubble, and fixes his attention on a single cloud in the distance. He stares at it as if he might somehow affect its behaviour, until eventually it drifts away.

I liked the absurd seriousness of that moment. So I reduced the cover to the cloud, an unnaturally clear blue sky and the black smoke rising through the ruined landscape below. For a 700-page war novel, the central image is almost ridiculously small, but that seemed somehow right.