LIKE THE APPEARANCE OF HORSES

Andrew Krivak is an award-winning novelist whose books include The Bear, a Banff Mountain Book Competition winner, Massachusetts Book Award winner, LibraryReads selection, and National Endowment for the Arts Big Read selection, as well as the freestanding novels of the Dardan Trilogy: The Sojourn, a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Chautauqua Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize; The Signal Flame, a Chautauqua Prize finalist; and Like the Appearance of Horses, a Library Journal “Best Book of the Year.” He lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

Krivak’s Website: https://www.andrewkrivak.com/

Library Journal “Best Literary Fiction of the Year” selection
Washington Independent Review of Books “Favorite Books of the Year” selection
Saturday Evening Post “Hot Reads” selection
Shelf Unbound “Recommended Reading” selection
Book Marks “Best Reviewed Books of the Week” selection
BookBrowse “Best Books Publishing This Week” selection

“[A] resplendent multigenerational family saga.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Subtle and nuanced.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Intensely readable.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“[Krivak’s] prose is spare and exquisite, breathing life into the mountains, the forests, and the foxholes these characters inhabit. A beautifully emotional and delicate novel.” —Historical Novels Review

“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 and Devil Makes Three

“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

“Read this! You’ll never be the same again.” —Linda Bond, Auntie’s Bookstore (Spokane, Washington)

“Oh my this novel is so gorgeous and moving. About matters of the heart, about war’s impact on not just nations but individuals over generations. About how families are knitted together and how they survive with heartbreak just around the corner. How solace can be found in nature. . . . This is one of those rare novels that quietly will not leave the reader alone and untouched. Just beautiful.” —Sheryl Cotleur, Copperfield’s Books (Northern California)

1. Like the Appearance of Horses is largely a story told in peacetime about the reverberating effects of war within a family. It takes place over decades but is related nonchronologically. How do the family’s stories crisscross over time to tell larger truths about war and homecoming, love and human connection?

2. The novel is as much about the women who stay at home as the men who go to war. How are the men’s experiences in war similar or different? What about their homecomings? What personal battles must the men and women fight during their separation, and—after the men return—how is the gulf of understanding between them bridged?

3. Duty and honor are constant themes threaded throughout the novel. Using the character genealogy from the back of the book as a reference, how do each of the men and women perceive their duties to family and country? Do any of them fail in their duty? Which of their actions would you describe as honorable or dishonorable?

4. The novel opens from Hannah’s perspective, and it ends with hers as well. Why is this important? What impact does she have on everyone’s lives? How does she learn to cope with tragedy? And, as the other characters grapple with illness, addiction, and grief, how do they each find fortitude?

5. Many of the characters have a deep connection with the Pennsylvania mountains and the land around it. How does the connection with nature heal the wounds of war? How does it set the scene for or reopen conflict?

6. Did you understand why Samuel, who had been held prisoner in Vietnam, left Dardan? What did he find as he traveled across the American Southwest? What other journeys are integral to the story?

7. The title of the novel is taken from the Biblical quote “their appearance is like the appearance of horses, and like warhorses, so they run.” How does this connect to the themes of the novel? How does war challenge the characters’ relationship with their faith?

8. How do the generations within this family pass down lessons about the responsibilities and costs of war? Are the children fated to make the same choices as their parents? Does the novel impart the message that there is hope for peace and healing?

9. Krivak has described a childhood memory that inspired part of the novel: “I was a ten-year-old boy when the airmen POWs returned from Hoa Lo prison in 1973. . . . All of a sudden, there they were. Alive. Beaten, but alive.” What iconic moments from our country’s many wars over the years are touched on in the novel? Does Krivak explore any aspects of these wars that you weren’t familiar with? For example, did you know about the roles of the Romani people or mountaineer soldiers in WWII?

10. Although this is a freestanding novel that contains its own complete narrative, it is also the culminating book in a trilogy. If you’ve read the preceding novels, how did Like the Appearance of Horses further the themes of The Sojourn and The Signal Flame? How does it recall ancient epic poems of wars and odysseys? What does Krivak’s saga add to the modern canon of war literature? And do you believe the story of this family has now been fully told?

A Note for Readers from Author Andrew Krivak

Like the Appearance of Horses is the freestanding culmination of my three novels set in the fictional town of Dardan, Pennsylvania. It takes up the lives of characters from two blended families, showing how they’ve been shaped by war in the 20^th century, as each generation struggles with its own sense of love and loss, duty and morality, honor and shame. The title is taken from a line in the prophet Joel, who is describing a plague of locusts: “Their appearance is like the appearance of horses, and like war horses, so they run.”

The novel begins in 1933, when Jozef Vinich—who has left the old country and created a life for himself, his wife, and his daughter in the Pennsylvania mountains—is surprised by the arrival of the half-Romani child he saved during WWI. Jozef welcomes Becks, treats him like a son, and teaches him the ways of his family and the land. Eventually Becks and Jozef’s daughter, Hannah, fall in love and marry, and have their two sons Bo and Sam. But when WWII takes Becks back to Europe as an American serviceman and, later, his son Sam to Vietnam, the wages of war come back to the family.

To put it as succinctly as possible, Like the Appearance of Horses is a novel about generations of one family that have been shaped by the many wars we have seen in the long martial arc of the 20^th century, and how each generation—women and men both, at home and abroad—responds, in its own way and in its own time, to the calls and struggles of those wars that have shaped us as a nation.

In the twenty years I’ve been writing fiction, one of the things I’ve fallen in love with and that has driven me to create a multi-generational history of one family has been the challenge and the joy of fleshing out a multitude of characters. This novel has the largest palette of characters I’ve ever worked with as a writer. Not only will you encounter Jozef Vinich, his daughter Hannah, and her sons Bo and Sam, but also Jozef’s wife Helen, his cousin Frances, who is modeled after my own great aunt, Burne Grayson, who served with Sam in Vietnam, and my favorite, Father Tomáš Rovnávaha, as well as many other characters who come and go along the way. Each one is a crucial piece of the family’s puzzle. Each one is like a teacher who appears when a main character is in need of that teacher the most. And in case readers need help remembering who is who, there’s a full genealogy in the back of the book.

Like the Appearance of Horses owes its life, as my previous novels do, to the stories my grandmother told me as a boy growing up in Pennsylvania about what is now Slovakia, and what being an Eastern European immigrant was like in this country between the world wars. When I used to sit and listen to my grandmother tell us stories, I became fascinated by the realization that stories rarely move in a linear arc, especially when the storytelling is not a one-time event but rather a ritual one returns to week after week, year after year.

Storytellers don’t always get the stories straight and in full the first time around, detail by orderly detail. For this reason, the novel doesn’t progress in a linear fashion. Rather, it moves back and forth in time, taking up the stories of different characters and their connections in a way that allows for the surprise of revelation. Because that’s how stories move when they’re told to us, that’s often how our memories of events move when they become the basis of stories, and that’s how time works when it’s inhabited by a character in the process of becoming: like the appearance of horses on a plain, not there one minute, there the next, then gone again.

I hope that readers will find Like the Appearance of Horses a vast, challenging, mournful, and ultimately triumphant novel. In a word, I hope they’ll find it beautiful, from beginning to end, and in every revealing appearance of what it means to live and love and sacrifice along the way.