Mule Boy, Andrew Krivak
Mule Boy, Andrew Krivak
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Mule Boy

Author: Andrew Krivak

Narrator: Charles Linshaw

Unabridged: 4 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/10/2026

Synopsis

An elegiac novel of men lost in a coal mining disaster and the boy who survives to tell the storyOn New Year’s Day, 1929, Ondro Prach, the thirteen-year-old son of Slovak immigrants in Pennsylvania coal country, begins a new job as mule boy. He knows the danger—his father died in the mines—but he is proud of his position handling the animal that hauls cartloads of coal from shafts deep within the earth to the surface. After Ondro earns the trust of the miners and the mule in his charge, the room the men are working collapses and their fate is sealed.From that moment onward, Ondro carries the hard memory of that day, a burden that leads to addiction and imprisonment, costing him his family. But, years later, when the miners’ loved ones come searching for answers, he finds the strength to share what the men spoke of and prayed for in the pitch black.Told in incantatory prose set to the rhythm of human breath, this sublime novel turns the memento mori into a meditation not only on death but on what it takes to tunnel through darkness and live.

About Andrew Krivak

Andrew Krivak is the author of The Bear, a Mountain Book Competition winner, Massachusetts Book Award winner, and NEA Big Read selection, as well as the 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. He lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts, and Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Angela M on August 15, 2025

The wooden rosary beads that belonged to his father, carved from a tree in his homeland before coming to America, the complete works of Shakespeare, the book of Jonah hand written in the Hebrew he learned from his friend Jacobson while in prison, the haunting memories, and the love he has carried in......more

Goodreads review by Karen on April 16, 2026

This was a perfect novel! It has been awhile since Krivak wrote a new book but this was worth the wait. On New Years Day in 1929, thirteen year old Ondro worked his first day as the mule boy in the mines in Pennsylvania, along with four men who he became trapped with in a mining disaster. After four da......more

Goodreads review by switterbug (Betsey) on February 25, 2026

[5+] A mule boy is a child-laborer in the 1900s coal mines who carted the coal cars from chamber to chamber. Ondro Prach is the thirteen-year-old in Krivak’s masterpiece who rides Wicked, the mule, proudly doing his work with dignity in a Pennsylvania coal mine in 1929. He’s trying to help out his w......more

Goodreads review by Jill on April 13, 2025

What is it that I’ve just read? I daresay, it’s Andrew Krivak’s masterwork. I rarely anoint a book with the tag “perfect.” But I can honestly not identify one word out of place or one scene that’s superfluous. This book IS perfection, and if I sound as if I’m over-the-top with my praise, it’s just th......more

Goodreads review by Pat on February 15, 2026

Ondro Prach is a 13-year-old Slovka American boy who works as a handler for his mule, Wicked, in a Pennsylvania coal mine in 1929 when the mine collapses and he alone survives. Ondro tells the story in haunting prose about the disaster and aftermath that shapes his life. In his seventies, Ondro is c......more

Quotes

“Krivak brilliantly succeeds at plumbing the depths of the human spirit and showing how the dead live on in memory. This is flawless.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A harrowing and immersive novel, Mule Boy fathoms the depths of personal anguish and emergence.” Foreword Reviews

“Descending into the coal mines of Pennsylvania in the early part of the twentieth century, Andrew Krivak has come up with a diamond. Mule Boy is both mesmerizing and emotionally shattering. Its beautiful, hypnotic, lyrical prose, often reminiscent of the scriptures, casts a spell so profound that you will not want to break out of it.”  Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others

“Andrew Krivak is one of contemporary fiction’s finest architects of the line, and I am utterly swept away by his lyric, daring, and kinetic music. Mule Boy is a riveting exploration of the ghosts we carry coiled within us—and what is unleashed when they leap out into the present. This book is as brilliant and sure as a bolt of lightning.”  Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

“Sometimes you hold a writer so close you want them all to yourself. Andrew Krivak has been that writer for me and his Mule Boy blazes so brightly it has already become, in my life, a great constellation. This novel is bewitching sorcery, a total wonder, a raging fever dream that sings and bellows and captures the entirety of our lives—all the things we fear and love and let go of and win back and cherish the most. It should, and will, stand alongside the works of Roberto Bolaño, Marilynne Robinson, and Denis Johnson. Here is a tale for our times, for all time.” Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters

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