The Sojourn
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.
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Praise for The Sojourn
National Book Award Finalist
Chautauqua Prize Winner
Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winner
Additional Accolades
American Booksellers Association Indie Next List & Indie Next Reading Group List * Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection * Dublin Literary Award Longlist * Julia Ward Howe Book Award Finalist * Boston Globe Bestseller
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by
NPR * Washington Post * Plain Dealer * Virginian-Pilot * Barnes & Noble Review
"Some writers are good at drawing a literary curtain over reality, and then there are writers who raise the veil and lead us to see for the first time. Krivak belongs to the latter. The Sojourn, about a war and a family and coming-of-age, does not present a single false moment of sentimental creation. Rather, it looks deeply into its characters' lives with wisdom and humanity, and, in doing so, helps us experience a distant past that feels as if it could be our own." --National Book Award judges' citation
"A story that celebrates, in its stripped down but resonant fashion, the flow between creation and destruction we all call life." --Dayton Literary Peace Prize judges' citation
"A novel of uncommon lyricism and moral ambiguity that balances the spare with the expansive." --Chautauqua Prize committee citation
"A gripping and harrowing war story that has the feel of a classic." --NPR "Year's Top Book Club Picks" citation
"Splendid. . . . A novel for anyone who has a sharp eye and ear for life." --NPR All Things Considered
"[A] powerful, assured first novel. . . . If the early pages of The Sojourn sometimes recall Cormac McCarthy (especially The Crossing), the heart of the book is a harrowing portrait of men at war, as powerful as Ernst Junger's classic Storm of Steel and Isaac Babel's brutally poetic Red Cavalry stories." --Washington Post
"A beautiful tale of persistence and dogged survival." --Los Angeles Times
"A classic of war. . . . Beautifully plotted, as rapt and understated as a hymn." --Plain Dealer
"Captivating, thoughtful. . . . A poignant reminder of how humanity was so greatly affected by what was once called the war to end all wars." --Star Tribune
"[The Sojourn] deserves to be placed on the same shelf as Remarque, Hemingway and Heller. . . . Krivak has written an anti-war novel with all the heat of a just-fired artillery gun." --Barnes and Noble Review/Christian Science Monitor
"Unsentimental yet elegant. . . . With ease, [The Sojourn] joins the ranks of other significant works of fiction portraying World War I." --Library Journal (starred review)
"Assured, meditative. . . . Krivak has his own voice, given to lyrical observations on the nature of human existence." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Charged with emotion and longing . . . this lean, resonant debut is an undeniably powerful accomplishment." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Beautiful. . . . Deftly wrought. . . . Krivak studied all the Great War novels before writing, and the result is a debut novel at home amongst those classics. Highly recommended." --Historical Novels Review (Editors' Choice review)
"The Sojourn is a fiercely wrought novel, populated by characters who lead harsh, even brutal lives, which Krivak renders with impressive restraint, devoid of embellishment or sentimentality. And yet--almost despite such a stoic prose style--his sentences accrue and swell and ultimately break over a reader like water: they are that supple and bracing and shining." --Leah Hager Cohen, author of The Grief of Others and Strangers and Cousins
"The Sojourn is a work of uncommon strength by a writer of rare and powerful elegance about a war, now lost to living memory, that echoes in headlines of international strife to this day." --Mary Doria Russell, author of The Sparrow and The Women of the Copper County
"Intimate and keenly observed, [The Sojourn] is a war story, love story, and coming of age novel all rolled into one. I thought of Lermontov and Stendhal, Joseph Roth and Cormac McCarthy as I read. But make no mistake. Krivak's voice and sense of drama are entirely his own." --Sebastian Smee, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic
Select Praise for Like the Appearance of Horses, the final freestanding novel of the Dardan Trilogy
"An engaging book that raises provocative questions about how we perceive and engage with the past and is a further testament to Krivak's masterful abilities as a storyteller." --WBUR
"Krivak's resplendent multigenerational family saga expertly braids the horrors of war with the struggles of those waiting for loved ones to return home." --Booklist (starred review)
"[An] intensely readable whopper of a book." --Library Journal (starred review)
"Subtle and nuanced." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Andrew Krivak charts a razor-fine line between war and peace, damnation and redemption, estrangement and love, and along the way gives us a gorgeously detailed portrait of an American family. Whether he's writing about battle, the natural world, or the most private, searing matters of the heart, Krivak brings a rare mastery to the page, a synthesis of language and deep perception that delivers revelation after revelation. Like the Appearance of Horses is a major achievement." --Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
"Krivak's Homeric novel is at once intimate and sweeping, expanding an epic story set into motion in The Sojourn. Tenderly attentive to all that is given and taken by war, Like the Appearance of Horses is a graceful, heroic accomplishment that speaks to the costs of duty when violence is as constant as the Pennsylvania mountains that anchor and separate this indelible family we've come to know so personally." --Asako Serizawa, author of Inheritors
More Praise for Andrew Krivak
"[Krivak's] work has been compared to William Faulkner's in its rich sense of place, to Wendell Berry's in its attentiveness to natural beauty, and to Cormac McCarthy's in its deep investigation of violence and myth. Yet all of Krivak's writing, and especially his fiction, presents a truly singular vision." --Anthony Domestico, Image
"An extraordinarily elegant writer, with a deep awareness of the natural world." --Roxana Robinson, New York Times Book Review
"Eloquent, sensitive." --Jennifer Haigh, Boston Globe
"Incandescent." --Marlon James
"Spare and lovely." --Adam Johnson
"Grand and unforgettable." --Maaza Mengiste
"Destined for great things." --Richard Russo
"[A] singular talent." --Jesmyn Ward
"Explores themes that profoundly resonate today." --Harper's Bazaar
