An Award-Winning Author
A National Book Award Finalist Author
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 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.
And 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.