"The Names of Rivers is a tightly crafted search for redemption and forgiveness within the shadows of a family's past. Set in a 1980s rustbelt town south of Chicago, the novel 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 toward his suicidal end in a cornfield ruined by a freakish ice storm. When Bruno's youngest son Len unexpectedly returns home, recovered from the heroin addiction he learned as a hospital corpsman in Saigon, he brings with him an old wound that Bruno Konick can never let himself touch."--BOOK JACKET.