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Andrew Krivak charts a razor-fine line between war and peace, damnation and redemption, estrangement and love, and along the way gives us a gorgeously detailed portrait of an American family. Whether he’s writing about battle, the natural world, or the most private, searing matters of the heart, Krivak brings a rare mastery to the page, a synthesis of language and deep perception that delivers revelation after revelation. Like the Appearance of Horses is a major achievement.

- Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

A novel of one family, a century of war, and the promise of homecoming, by Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivak

Rooted in the small, mountain town of Dardan, Pennsylvania, where patriarch Jozef Vinich settled after surviving World War I, Like the Appearance of Horses immerses us in the intimate lives of a family whose fierce bonds have been shaped by the great conflicts of the past century.

After Bexhet Konar escapes fascist Hungary and crosses the ocean to find Jozef, the man who saved his life in 1919, he falls in love with Jozef’s daughter, Hannah, enlists in World War II, and is drawn into a personal war of revenge. Many years later, their youngest son, Samuel, is taken prisoner in Vietnam and returns home with a heroin addiction and deep physical and psychological wounds. As Samuel travels his own path toward healing, his son will graduate from Annapolis as a Marine on his way to Iraq.

In spare, breathtaking prose, Like the Appearance of Horses is the freestanding, culminating novel in Andrew Krivak’s award-winning Dardan Trilogy, which began with The Sojourn and The Signal Flame. It is a story about borders drawn within families as well as around nations, and redrawn by ethnicity, prejudice, and war. It is also a tender story of love and how it is tested by duty, loyalty, and honor.

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cover image of the book Like the Appearance of Horses

Praise for Like the Appearance of Horses

Oh my this novel is so gorgeous and moving. About matters of the heart, about war’s impact on not just nations but individuals over generations. About how families are knitted together and how they survive with heartbreak just around the corner. How solace can be found in nature…This is one of those rare novels that quietly will not leave the reader alone and untouched. Just beautiful.

- Sheryl Cotleur, Copperfield’s Books (Northern California) on Like the Appearance of Horses
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The Bear

Fiction

A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion.

In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They possess a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches the girl how to fish and hunt, the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind. But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can only learn to listen.

cover image of the book The Bear

Praise for The Bear

In spare and lovely prose, Andrew Krivak folds the deep past and the far future into a remarkable fable about our inheritance as humanity makes a harmonic return to the spirit and animal worlds. This book follows you, like a river under ice.

- Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master’s Son and Fortune Smiles
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The Sojourn

Fiction

A poignant tale of fathers and sons, addressing the great immigration to America and the desire to live the American dream amid the unfolding tragedy in Europe.

National Book Award Finalist#

Winner of The Chautauqua Prize#

An Indie Next List selection: Great Reads from Booksellers You Trust#

A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection#

Winner 2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize#

cover image of the book The Sojourn

Praise for The Sojourn

Unsentimental yet elegant…with ease [The Sojourn] joins the ranks of other significant works of fiction portraying World War I – Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front or Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

- Library Journal (starred review)
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The stunning second novel from National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivák – a heartbreaking, captivating story about a family awaiting the return of their youngest son from the Vietnam War.

In their small town in northeastern Pennsylvania, Hannah and her son Bo mourn the loss of the family patriarch, Jozef Vinich. They were three generations under one roof, a war-haunted family in a war-torn century, but only one branch of a scraggy tree.

Having survived the trenches of World War I as an Austro-Hungarian conscript, Jozef journeyed to America and built a life for his children. His daughter Hannah married the European-born Bexhet Konar, who deserted the American army in World War II and, after his imprisonment, was killed in a hunting accident on the family land. Finally, in 1971, Hannah’s prodigal younger son, Sam, was reported missing in action in Vietnam.

Bo, Hannah’s remaining child, chooses a different path from his brother: Quiet, full of conviction, and with a firstborn’s sense of duty, Bo remains at home to grieve and to hope for reunion, to create new life, to embrace the land and work. From the narrative of this family’s experience, The Signal Flame emerges as a stirring novel about generations of men and women and the events that define them, old world values yielding to new world ways, and the convalescence of memory and hurt.

Beginning shortly after Easter in 1972 and ending on Christmas Eve, this ambitious novel gracefully evokes ordinary time, a period of living and working while waiting and watching and expecting. The Signal Flame is gorgeously written, honoring the cycles of earth and body, humming with blood and passion, and it confirms Andrew Krivák as a writer of extraordinary vision and power.

cover image of the book The Signal Flame

Praise for The Signal Flame

With The Signal Flame Andrew Krivák shows us what masterful fiction can do. Inch by inch he reveals the hidden life of a multi-generational family, its impossible tensions and their miraculous resolutions. The beauty of the language invites you to go deep and become involved in the unfolding story, worried about the characters and relieved at their physical and emotional survival. Like a dream the story swallowed me up, and I came out of it more aware of the narrative power of my own life.

- Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul
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