Ride with Me, Mariah Montana

Ride with Me, Mariah Montana
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2013-07-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1476745153

This greathearted novel is the finale of Ivan Doig's passionate and authentic trilogy about the McCaskill family and their alluring Two Medicine country along the hem of the northern Rockies. Jick McCaskill, the illustrious narrator of English Creek, returns as the witty 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 when his daughter Mariah enlists him as Winnebago chauffeur to her and her ex-husband, the magnificently ornery and eloquent columnist Riley Wright, when their news-paper dispatches them to dig up stories of the "real Montana." Just as the centennial is a cause for reflection as well as jubilation, the exuberant travels of this trio bring on encounters with the past in "memory storms" that become occasions for reassessment and necessary accommodations of the heart.

Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Dancing at the Rascal Fair
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2013-08-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1439124949

The central volume in Ivan Doig's acclaimed Montana trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is an authentic saga of the American experience at the turn of this century and a passionate, portrayal of the immigrants who dared to try new lives in the imposing Rocky Mountains. Ivan Doig's supple tale of landseekers unfolds into a fateful contest of the heart between Anna Ramsay and Angus McCaskill, walled apart by their obligations as they and their stormy kith and kin vie to tame the brutal, beautiful Two Medicine country.

English Creek

English Creek
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2005-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0743271270

The portrait of a time and a place -Montana in the 1930's -- is depicted through the McCaskill family's personal struggles.

Last Bus to Wisdom

Last Bus to Wisdom
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2016-08-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 110198256X

Named a Best Book of the Year by the Seattle Times 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.

Bucking the Sun

Bucking the Sun
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2013-07-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1439125341

Bucking the Sun is the story of the Duff family, homesteaders driven from the Montana bottomland to work on one of the New Deal’s most audacious projects—the damming of the Missouri River. Through the story of each family member—a wrathful father, a mettlesome mother, and three very different sons, and the memorable women they marry—Doig conveys a sense of time and place that is at once epic in scope and rich in detail.

Mountain Time

Mountain Time
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2013-07-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1439125252

At fifty-something, environmental reporter Mitch Rozier has grown estranged from Seattle's coffee shop and cyber culture. His newspaper is going under, and his relationship with Lexa McCaskill is stalled at "just living together." Then, he is summoned by his sly, exasperating father, Lyle, back to the family land, which Lyle plans to sell in the latest of his get-rich schemes before dying. Lexa follows, accompanied by her sister Mariah, and the stage is set for long-overdue confrontations -- between lovers, sisters, and father and son. Mountain Time is distinguished by humor and a wry insight into the power of family feuds to mark individuals and endure. Set against the glorious backdrop of Montana mountain country, it is a dazzling novel of love, family, and the contemporary West.

The Bartender's Tale

The Bartender's Tale
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2013-08-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1594631484

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.

Work Song

Work Song
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2011-07-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1594485208

"[A] novel that best expresses the American spirit." –The Chicago Tribune “If America was a melting pot, Butte seemed to be its boiling point,” observes Morrie Morgan, the itinerant teacher and inveterate charmer who stole readers’ hearts in The Whistling Season. A decade later, he steps off the train and into the copper mining capital of the world in its jittery 1919 heyday. While the riches of “the Richest Hill on Earth” may elude him, once again a colorful cast of local characters seek him out. Before long, Morrie is caught up in the clash between the ironfisted Anaconda Mining Company, radical “outside agitators,” and the beleaguered miners. As tensions build aboveground and below, Morrie finds a unique way to give a voice to those who truly need one, and Ivan Doig proves yet again why he’s reigning king of Western fiction.

The Eleventh Man

The Eleventh Man
Author: Ivan Doig
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2009-09-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547350589

After Pearl Harbor, the lives of eleven Montana college football teammates are changed forever in an “intensely suspenseful and moving” novel (Scott Turow). In the early 1940s, the starting lineup of Treasure State University’s football team are local heroes. But as America is pulled into World War II, they feel called to become heroes of another kind. Now, ten of them are scattered around the globe in the war’s lonely and dangerous theaters. The eleventh man, Ben Reinking, has been plucked from pilot training by a military propaganda machine. He is to chronicle the adventures of his teammates, man by man, for publication in small-town newspapers across the country like the one his father edits. Ready for action, Reinking chafes at the assignment—not knowing that it will bring him love from an unexpected quarter and test the law of averages, which holds that all but one of his teammates should come through the conflict unscathed . . .

Breaking Clean

Breaking Clean
Author: Judy J. Blunt
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2016-04-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1101973587

“A memoir with the fierce narrative force of an eastern Montana blizzard, rich in story and character, filled with the bone-chilling details of Blunt’s childhood. She writes without bitterness, with an abiding love of the land and the work and her family and friends that she finally left behind, at great sacrifice, to begin to write. This is a magnificent achievement, a book for the ages. I’ve never read anything that compares with it.” —James Crumley, author of The Last Good Kiss Born into a third generation of Montana homesteaders, Judy Blunt learned early how to “rope and ride and jockey a John Deere,” but also to “bake bread and can vegetables and reserve my opinion when the men were talking.” The lessons carried her through thirty-six-hour blizzards, devastating prairie fires and a period of extreme isolation that once threatened the life of her infant daughter. But though she strengthened her survival skills in what was—and is—essentially a man’s world, Blunt’s story is ultimately that of a woman who must redefine herself in order to stay in the place she loves. Breaking Clean is at once informed by the myths of the West and powerful enough to break them down. Against formidable odds, Blunt has found a voice original enough to be called classic.