The Signal Flame - Andrew Krivak

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. nIn 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.

n nAnd 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.

n nBeginning 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).n