The National Book Awards

The National Book Award finalists have just been announced and there are a number of books on the list which immediately grabbed my attention. One of them is The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak, a former Jesuit.


Some of what he calls, in this interesting conversation, his genealogy of faith has found its way into his first novel:


Did I, in the first-person narrative voice of the memoir, have a story to tell? That question remains open for anyone who may want to read what became A Long Retreat. Excised, however, from the middle of that spiritual memoir are facts that I would eventually weave into the fiction of The Sojourn. In my work of nonfiction, I talked a great deal about the genealogy of faith that my grandparents had passed along, and my opportunity as a Jesuit to travel to and live in Eastern Europe, so that I could taste and see the reality of the lives that populated the mythological “old country” I had heard about as a youth. But when those chapters hit the nonfiction cutting room floor, I thought, “Okay, maybe not here, but they belong somewhere, and maybe my next project ought to find out where.”