The Signal Flame: A Novel

(Paperback)

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The stunning second novel from National Book Award finalist Andrew Krivkan 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 daughters husband, Bexhet, an immigrant, fights in World War IIreturning to Dardan, Pennsylvania, only to be taken in a hunting accident on Hannahs familys land. Finally, Hannahs younger son, Sam, goes MIA in Vietnam.

And so there is only Bo, a quiet man full of sorrow and conviction and a firstborns 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 explorationthe second stand-alone novel in a trilogy that began with the National Book Award finalist The Sojournof 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 Eveas the Vietnam War winds downthis 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 Krivks 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).

Reviews

"Krivak is an extraordinarily elegant writer, with a deep awareness of the natural world. In spare and beautiful prose he evokes an austere landscape, a struggling family and a deep source of pain ... Krivak sets the grandeur of the mountain as a backdrop to the intimate drama of the heart."
TheNew York TimesBook Review
"A satisfying act of conjuration, the sine qua non of realistic fiction: a vivid rendering of felt life. 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
"There is a deft, scholarly touch to Andrew Krivks straightforward writing ... a gripping tale."
The Buffalo News
"[G]reat fiction ...This beautifully told story will remain with the reader as a haunting and rewarding memory for a very long time."
The Minneapolis Star Tribune
"[A] bleak but breathtaking second novel ...its Krivks gorgeous prose and deep grasp of the relationship between longing and loss that make the book such a stunner."
Publisher's Weekly, starred review
With studied language and a strong sense of place, Krivak elucidates how family structures and narratives fractured, maintained, and evolved between World Wars I and the Vietnam War.
Library Journal, starred review
Krivks story and characters are mythic. His prose is spare, but his portrait of a little-known mountain region rife with stones and rattlesnakes is compelling, beautiful, and ennobling.
Booklist, starred review
"[F]ull of resounding depths: a dark commemoration of a dark time but offering the slim hope that things will get better."
Kirkus Reviews
"Readers will hear some echoes of Faulkner inThe Signal Flame,and even more of Kent Haruf in the simplicity, honesty, and wisdom of its prose. But what they'll hear most is the deep, thoughtful, resonant voice of AndrewKrivk, a writer seemingly destined for great things."
Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls
There aremany pleasures to be found in The Signal Flame: The intimacy and love with which Krivak writes about his postage stamp of rural Pennsylvania. His keen sense of time and place, the woods and forests and hills of the Endless Mountains. Page by page the book itself feels like an outgrowth of the soil in in which it is steeped.
Brad Kessler, author of Birds in Fall
"This is a novel of tremendous sorrow and tremendous beauty. Ofloveshaped by war, and of how the past haunts the present, and shapes thefuture. An incandescent work."
Marlon James, author ofA Brief History of Seven Killings
Andrew Krivk gives us characters and a community that could have come out ofThe Deer Huntermen and women challenged by natural and human-made disasters, love and simmering hate. While these small town people confront lifes big questions, the true north of the novel is in the day-to-day, the ordinary, whereKrivkhas found the extraordinary. A well-crafted novel, elegantly told,The Signal Flameis a testament toKrivk'ssingular talent.
Jesmyn Ward, author ofSalvage the BonesandMen We Reaped
The language in this beautiful book is as textured and richas quiet and grand and unforgettableas its setting: a small Pennsylvania town tucked in the mountains. It isn't often that a story finds me making comparisons to literary greats from the first page. This is one of those books. In the end, what Krivk does is something all his own, and it is a triumph.
Maaza Mengiste, author ofBeneath the Lion's Gaze

Author Bio

Andrew Krivk is the author of The Signal Flame and the National Book Award finalist, The Sojourn, which also won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Chautauqua Prize. He lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts.