From National Book Award in Fiction finalist Andrew Krivak comes a gorgeous fable of Earth's last two human inhabitants, and a girl's journey home

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.

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

Andrew Krivak is the author of two previous novels: The Signal Flame, a Chautauqua Prize finalist, and The Sojourn, a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Chautauqua Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire, in the shadow of Mount Monadnock, which inspired much of the landscape in The Bear.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE WINNER

A stirring tale of brotherhood, coming of age, and survival during World War I

The Sojourn is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a family tragedy and returns with his father to an impoverished shepherd's life in rural Austria-Hungary. When war comes, Jozef joins his adopted brother as a sharpshooter in the Kaiser's army, surviving a perilous trek across the frozen Italian Alps and capture by a victorious enemy.

Strikingly contemporary though replete with evocative historical detail, The Sojourn is the freestanding, first novel of Andrew Krivak's award-winning Dardan Trilogy, which concludes with Like the Appearance of Horses. Inspired by the author's family history, it is also 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.

Now in paperback from Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner and National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivak--a novel of one family, a century of war, and the promise of homecoming

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.

In spare, breathtaking prose, Andrew Krivak delivers a deeply compassionate story about three generations who built a new life in America, participated in the Romani resistance during World War II, survived Vietnamese POW camps, watched their children deploy to Iraq, and did everything they could to heal the wounds of war when the fighting was over.

The stunning second novel from National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivák--an extraordinarily elegant writer, with a deep awareness of the natural world (The New York Times Book Review)--tells the heartbreaking, captivating story about a family awaiting the return of their youngest son from the Vietnam War.

In a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania, Hannah and her son Bo mourn the loss of the family patriarch, Jozef. They were three generations under one roof; a war-haunted family in a war-torn century. Jozef was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I. His American-born daughter's husband, Bexhet, an immigrant, fights in World War II--returning to Dardan, Pennsylvania, only to be taken in a hunting accident on Hannah's family's land. Finally, Hannah's younger son, Sam, goes MIA in Vietnam.

And so there is only Bo, a quiet man full of sorrow and conviction and a firstborn's sense of duty. He is left to grieve but also to hope for reunion, to fall in love and create a new life, to embrace the land and work its mountain soil. The Signal Flame is a stirring exploration--the second stand-alone novel in a trilogy that began with the National Book Award finalist The Sojourn--of generations of men and the events that define them, brothers who take different paths, the old European values yielding to new world ways, and the convalescence of memory and war.

Beginning shortly after Easter in 1972 and ending on Christmas Eve--as the Vietnam War winds down--this ambitious novel honors the cycles of earth and body, humming with blood and passion, and it confirms as a writer of extraordinary vision and power. Andrew Krivák's The Signal Flame is a complex and layered portrait of a time and place, and a family shaped, generation after generation, by the memory of war (The Boston Globe).

This new volume of poetry from National Book Award Finalist Andrew Krivak explores in supple and often terrifying lines the breathtaking landscapes of memory and the natural world for which his fiction is celebrated. From the Pennsylvania coal mines to the fields and mountainsides of New Hampshire, these poems search for order in a father's everyday work, the changing seasons, and the myths that shape America and its people. Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves is a poetic study in what we have lost, and what we still hold on to. A meditation in verse that deepens with each read.

Advance Praise for Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves

Here in these powerful new poems that make up Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves, Andrew Krivak presents those haunting, scintillant images he gave us earlier in The Signal Flame and The Bear: A wilderness drumming in the shadows of the Monadnock range, with its unforgiving ice, its Dantesque slopes, and the howl of those ghost wolves and coyotes. In the end, it's a father's hope to somehow protect one's children against those nightmarish forces we know are beyond our control.

Paul Mariani, author of Crossing Cocytus and The Great Wheel

Andrew Krivak's collection, Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves, celebrates the history of a place in the only way that matters - by giving us the people of the place. In Lake Ice, there's a passage that suggests his method of poetic exploration: The narrator and his children stand on a frozen lake and watch the auger as it turns and searches, turns and searches through each frozen layer, until water so green and cold it looks oily gushes up and settles into slush around our boots. Krivak's close eye for the sensory detail grounds all of these poems, and the work reminds me of Harry Humes and the early poems of James Dickey. Reader, get ready to be immersed, get ready to learn what the auger can find.

Charles Rafferty, author of A Cluster of Noisy Planets

A novel of one family, a century of war, and the promise of homecoming from 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.

In spare, breathtaking prose, Andrew Krivak delivers a deeply compassionate story about three generations who built a new life in America, participated in the Romani resistance during World War II, survived Vietnamese POW camps, watched their children deploy to Iraq, and did everything they could to heal the wounds of war when the fighting was over.

An elegiac novel of men lost in a coal mining disaster and the boy who survives to tell the story

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.