Ivan Doig

Named a Best Book of the Year by the Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Kirkus Review The final novel from a great American storyteller. Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Ivan Doig's beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an eleven-year-old's imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery for "female trouble" in the summer of 1951, all she can think to do is to ship Donal off to her sister in faraway Manitowoc, Wisconsin. There Donal is in for a rude surprise: Aunt Kate-bossy, opinionated, argumentative, and tyrannical--is nothing like her sister. She henpecks her good-natured husband, Herman the German, and Donal can't seem to get on her good side either. After one contretemps too many, Kate packs him back to the authorities in Montana on the next Greyhound. But as it turns out, Donal isn't traveling solo: Herman the German has decided to fly the coop with him. In the immortal American tradition, the pair light out for the territory together, meeting a classic Doigian ensemble of characters and having rollicking misadventures along the way. Charming, wise, and slyly funny, Last Bus to Wisdom is a last sweet gift from a writer whose books have bestowed untold pleasure on countless readers.

Last Bus to Wisdom

Hired as a housekeeper to work on the early 1900s Montana homestead of widower Oliver Milliron, the irreverent Rose and her brother, Morris, endeavor to educate the widower's sons while witnessing local efforts on a massive irrigation project.

The Whistling Season

The fifteenth anniversary edition of the author's classic memoirs includes a new introduction that provides new information on the making of the book. By the author of The House of Sky.

Landscapes of a Western Mind

This House of Sky

Running a venerable bar in 1960 Montana while raising his 12-year-old son, single father Tom Harry finds his world upended by the arrival of a woman from his past and her beatnik daughter, who claims Tom as her father and upends the town with her passionate and pretentious modern views. By the National Book Award finalist author of Work Song.

The Bartender's Tale

In 1853, four Scandinavian indentured laborers in Russian Alaska steal a canoe and begin to paddle south toward the mouth of the Columbia River, twelve thousand miles away. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

The Sea Runners

English Creek

A haunting, evocative novel of one family's search for the new West--and for each other--here is the final volume in Doig's McCaskill trilogy. Witty and moving, rich in its voice and feel of the land, Ride with Me, Mariah Montana is full of the pleasure of a place and a people that Ivan Doig has made uniquely his own.

Ride with Me, Mariah Montana

From the celebrated and uniquely American author Ivan Doig—an unforgettable portrait of the western United States—his stunning Montana Trilogy: English Creek; Dancing at the Rascal Fair; and Ride With Me, Mariah Montana, now available in a boxed set. “Here is the real Montana, the real West, through the eyes of a real writer.” —Wallace Stegner Covering the first century of Montana’s statehood from 1889 to 1989, Ivan Doig’s Montana Trilogy follows the McCaskill family and their alluring Two Medicine country along the hem of the northern Rockies. Doig first recounts the events of a Two Medicine country summer in English Creek, as fourteen-year-old Jick McCaskill comes of age. Through Jick’s eyes we see his friends and family at turning points and discover Jick’s own connection to the land, to history, and to the deep-fathomed mysteries of one’s kin and one’s self. The central volume in Doig’s acclaimed trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, explores the American experience at the turn of the century, a passionate portrayal of the immigrants who dared to try new lives in the imposing Rocky Mountains. Finally, Jick McCaskill returns in Ride With Me, Mariah Montana as the clever and moving voice in this classic encounter with the American road and all the rewards and travails it can bring. Jick faces his family’s—and his state’s—legacy of loss and perseverance from the vantage point of Montana’s centennial in 1989. Doig created one of the most captivating families in American fiction in these prizewinning portraits of time and place—Montana at three pivotal points in the twentieth century. Ivan Doig is “a presiding figure in the literature of the American West” (The New York Times Book Review) and will be canonized as such.

English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride With Me, Mariah Montana

The Montana Trilogy Boxed Set

La stagione fischiettante

After inheriting a fixer-upper, newlywed Morrie Morgan returns to 1920s Butte, Montana to fight a rival newspaper and help the miners working for the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in this latest Western from the author of The Whistling Season.

Sweet Thunder

Mitch Rozier is a middle-aged environmental reporter in Seattle, estranged from the cyber-culture that surrounds him. A summons from his dying father, who has one last scheme up his sleeve, takes Mitch back to the family land and to the unanswered questions at the heart of the long-standing rift between them.

A Novel

Mountain Time

Driven from the Montana bottomland to relief work on a New Deal dam project on the Missouri, the Duff family--three brothers, their parents, wives, and others--works on the Fort Peck Dam, but the unforgiving river and tragedy are always threatening

Bucking the Sun

L'ultima corriera per la saggezza

Prairie Nocturne is the epic saga of two former lovers sired in the pages of Ivan Doig's acclaimed Montana Trilogy. Susan Duff -- the bossy, indomitable schoolgirl with a silver voice from Dancing at the Rascal Fair-- has reached middle age alone, teaching voice lessons to the progeny of Helena's high society. Wesley Williamson, young married heir to the Double W cattle empire, has been forced out of a political career as a result of his affair with Susan having become known. Years later, Wes and Susan have reunited to share in an extraordinary goal: launching the singing career of Monty Rathbun--a man on the wrong side of the racial divide. In this triumph of sure-footed storytelling, motives and fates dangerously entangle. Set in Montana, France, Scotland, and New York during the Harlem Renaissance, Prairie Nocturne is a deeply longitudinal novel that raises everlasting questions of allegiance, the grip of the past, and the cost of passion.

Prairie Nocturne

From one of the greatest novelists of the American West comes a surprising and riveting story set in Montana and New York during the Harlem Renaissance, drawing together an unlikely set of thwarted performers in one last inspired grasp at life's set of gold rings: love and renown. Susan Duff -- the bossy, indomitable schoolgirl with a silver voice from the pages of Doig's most popular work, Dancing at the Rascal Fair -- has reached middle age alone, teaching voice lessons to the progeny of Helena's high society. Wesley Williamson -- business scion of a cattle-empire family -- has fallen from the heights of gubernatorial aspirations, forced out of a public career by political foes who uncovered his love affair with Susan. Years later, Susan is taken off guard when Wes arrives at her door with an unusual request: to train his chauffeur, Monty, in the ways of voice and performance. Prairie Nocturne is the saga of these three people and their interlocked destinies. Monty is distantly known to Susan from their childhoods in the Two Medicine country, yet an enforced stranger because of the racial divide. When she realizes he possesses a singing voice of rare splendor, Susan joins Wes's Pygmalion-like project to launch Monty on a performing career -- only to find the full force of the Ku Klux Klan in their way. As Monty and Susan overcome treacherous obstacles, Wes's mysterious motives unsettle everyone, including himself, and the trio's crossed fates form a deeply longitudinal novel that raises everlasting questions of allegiance, the grip of the past, and the costs of career and passion.

Acclaim for Ivan Doig's work begun with his 1978 memoir, This House of Sky. With powerful echoes of a family and its fate, this terrifically appealing companion builds with the drama and characters that only real life can hold.

Heart Earth

From a great American storyteller, a one-of-a-kind father and his precocious son, rocked by a time of change. Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable bar called The Medicine Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge of the town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom also has a son named Rusty, an “accident between the sheets” whose mother deserted them both years ago.The pair make an odd kind of family, with the bar their true home, but they manage just fine. Until the summer of 1960, that is, when Rusty turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when, and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom’s past? Without a doubt she is an unsettling gust of the future, upending every certainty in Rusty’s life and generating a mist of passion and pretense that seems to obscure everyone’s vision but his own. As Rusty struggles to decipher the oddities of adult behavior and the mysteries build toward a reckoning, Ivan Doig wonderfully captures how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.

A national bestseller, the story of “a boy’s last days of youth and a history his father can’t leave behind” (The Daily Beast). Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable bar called The Medicine Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge in the town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom also has a son named Rusty, an “accident between the sheets” whose mother deserted them both years ago. The pair make an odd kind of family, with the bar their true home, but they manage just fine. Until the summer of 1960, that is, when Rusty turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when, and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom’s past? Without a doubt she is an unsettling gust of the future, upending every certainty in Rusty’s life and generating a mist of passion and pretense that seems to obscure everyone’s vision but his own. The Bartender’s Tale wonderfully captures how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.

A beloved character brings the power of the press to 1920s Butte, Montana, in this latest from the best storyteller of the West In the winter of 1920, a quirky bequest draws Morrie Morgan back to Butte, Montana, from a year-long honeymoon with his bride, Grace. But the mansion bestowed by a former boss upon the itinerant charmer, who debuted in Doig’s bestselling The Whistling Season, promises to be less windfall than money pit. And the town itself, with its polyglot army of miners struggling to extricate themselves from the stranglehold of the ruthless Anaconda Copper Mining Company, seems—like the couple’s fast-diminishing finances—on the verge of implosion. These twin dilemmas catapult Morrie into his new career as editorialist for the Thunder, the fledgling union newspaper that dares to play David to Anaconda’s Goliath. Amid the clatter of typewriters, the rumble of the printing presses, and a cast of unforgettable characters, Morrie puts his gift for word-slinging to work. As he pursues victory for the miners, he discovers that he is enmeshed in a deeply personal battle as well—the struggle to win lasting love for himself. Brilliantly capturing an America roaring into a new age, Sweet Thunder is another great tale from a classic American novelist.

Ivan Doig’s companion memoir to his bestselling This House of Sky—inspired by the letters his mother wrote during World War II—is “a lyrical evocation of the Doigs’ gallantly hardscrabble existence and love for the unforgiving Montana mountains” (San Francisco Chronicle). Raised by his father and maternal grandmother, Ivan Doig grew up with only a vague memory of his mother, who died on his sixth birthday. Then he discovered a cache of her letters, and through them, a spunky, passionate, can-do woman emerged. His mother was as at home in the saddle as behind a sewing machine, and as in love with language as her son. In this prize-winning prequel to his acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, Doig brings to life his childhood before his mother’s death, and the family’s journey from the Montana mountains to the Arizona desert and back again. “Profoundly original and lustrous,” (Kirkus Reviews) Doig eloquently captures the texture of the American West during and after World War II, the fortune of a family, and one woman’s indomitable spirit. Doig is “a colloquial stylist without equal…and Heart Earth is a book that repeatedly proves the power of language” (Los Angeles Times).

Ivan Doig

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