Andrew Krivak Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Andrew Krivak
Author Andrew Krivak was born August 28, 1963 and raised in Pennsylvania, is the grandson of Slovak immigrants, and he has lived in London. Andrew has taught at the College of the Holy Cross, Harvard, and Boston College.

He is a graduate of the writing program at Columbia University and from St. John’s College in Annapolis. Andrew has a PhD in Modern Literature from Rutger’s University.

He lives with his wife and three kids in Jaffrey, New Hampshire and Somerville, Massachusetts.

Andrew got the idea for “The Sojourn” from wanting to write about his grandfather for a long time, and what it had to have been like for him and his grandma to grow up in what they referred to as the old country. He completed his memoir and talked to his agent about doing more nonfiction work based on this idea of Americans returning to Europe at the turn of the century.

Since he was living in London during this time, he was uniquely positioned to do a ton of research. She told him that it sounded as though he was looking to write a novel. It was the truth, but he needed her to tell him that.

He started with a single character, who was just an amalgam of many of his Slovak relatives that he had heard a bunch of stories on over many years. Andrew knew that he wanted the novel to be a spare one, and wanted it to have its own well-defined arc. He started out to model it after “Heart of Darkness”, and even wrote the first paragraph as an exact structural duplicate of that book. This novel’s own shape came slowly but surely.

He tried to capture in the book what he could just imagine from his days of listening to his grandma talk about a world, in all of her broken English, which was an often brutal and unforgiving way of life. A life she spoke about sometimes like she was actually spitting out a type of poison.

Andrew prefers to write to write in the morning, and when he is in the groove, he will write from five AM to seven AM. When he has some breakfast and his kids have gone to school, he can write another four hours from about nine in the morning until one in the afternoon. Should he be able to go that long, he is finished for the entire day. He prefers to write in the office, rather than any libraries or cafes since he needs a good cup of tea as well as the stability.

When Andrew is not writing, he enjoys to cross-country ski in the winter time and he also skate skis. He also enjoys reading and he seeks out writers that are going to surprise him and teach him something.

His debut novel, called “The Sojourn”, was released in the year 2011. He writes literary fiction and science fiction. Andrew has also written about his time in a Jesuit order, called “A Long Retreat”.

“The Sojourn” won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction and the first Chautauqua Prize. It was also nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction in the year 2011.

“The Sojourn” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2011. This is the story of Jozef Vinich, who became uprooted from a nineteenth-century mining town located in Colorado because of a family tragedy. He goes with his father off to live an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary.

When the Great War starts, Jozef joins up with his adopted brother as a sharpshooter in the Kaiser’s army. They make it through a dangerous journey over the frozen Italian Alps and avoid capture by a victorious enemy.

Readers found this novel to be a sobering and somber read with deeply descriptive and a totally visceral experience. Andrew wrote an affecting and stark, with some long sentence structures, and will require your attention. He is able to write with the beauty and precision of a well cut gem.

“The Signal Flame” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 2017. In a tiny town in northeastern Pennsylvania, Hannah and Bo, her son, are mourning the loss of Jozef, the patriarch of the family. They were three generations living under the same roof. A family haunted by war in a war-torn century.

Jozef was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. Bexhet, his American-born daughter’s husband and an immigrant, fights in World War II. He came back to Dardan, Pennsylvania just to be killed in a hunting accident on the land of Hannah’s family. Lastly, Sam, Hannah’s younger son, is missing in action in Vietnam.

There is just Bo, a quiet man filled with conviction and sorrow as well as the firstborn’s sense of duty. Bo is left to hope for a reunion, to grieve, to fall in love and create some kind of new life, to embrace the land, and work the mountain soil.

This novel is a layered and complex portrait of one place and time, and a family that becomes shaped by the memories of war, with each passing generation.

“The Bear” is the third stand alone novel and was released in the year 2020. A girl and her dad, in an Eden-like future, live close to the land in a lone mountain’s shadow. They possess some of the final remnants of civilization: a pane of glass, a few books, a comb, and a set of flint of steel and flint.

Dad teaches his daughter how to hunt and fish and all the stars as well as the secrets of the seasons. He gets her ready to spend an adulthood in harmony with nature, since they are the last of mankind.

After the girl finds that she is all alone in the unknown landscape, it is a bear that is going to lead her back to her home over a vast wilderness that offers up some of the greatest lessons there is, if she can just learn to listen.