On New Year’s Day, 1929, Ondro Prach, the thirteen-year-old son of Slovak immigrants in Pennsylvania coal country, begins a new job as mule boy. He knows the danger—his father died in the mines—but he is proud of his position handling the animal that hauls cartloads of coal from shafts deep within the earth to the surface. After Ondro earns the trust of the miners and the mule in his charge, the room the men are working collapses and their fate is sealed.

From that moment onward, Ondro carries the hard memory of that day, a burden that leads to addiction and imprisonment, costing him his family. But, years later, when the miners’ loved ones come searching for answers, he finds the strength to share what the men spoke of and prayed for in the pitch black.

Told in incantatory prose set to the rhythm of human breath, this sublime novel turns the memento mori into a meditation not only on death but on what it takes to tunnel through darkness and live.

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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.

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.

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.

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#