Ivan Doig
1) Work song
"If America was a melting pot, Butte would be its boiling point," observes Morrie Morgan, the itinerant teacher, walking encyclopedia, and inveterate charmer last seen leaving a one-room schoolhouse in Marias Coulee, the stage he stole in Ivan Doig's 2006 The Whistling Season. A...
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...
"Can't cook but doesn't bite." So begins the newspaper ad offering the services of an "A-1 housekeeper, sound morals, exceptional disposition" that draws the hungry attention of widower Oliver Milliron in the fall of 1909. And so begins the unforgettable season that deposits the noncooking, nonbiting, ever-whistling Rose Llewellyn and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias Coulee along with a stampede of homesteaders drawn by the
...7) Heart Earth
Ivan Doig grew up with only a vague memory of his mother, Berneta, who died on his sixth birthday. Then he discovered a cache of her letters—and through them, a spunky, passionate, can-do woman as at home in the saddle as behind a sewing machine, and as in love with language as Doig would prove to be. In this moving prequel to his acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, Doig brings to life his childhood before his mother's death and the
...13) The Sea Runners
In this timeless survival story, four indentured servants escape their Russian Alaska work camp in a stolen canoe, only to face a harrowing journey down the Pacific Northwest coast. Battling unrelenting high seas and fierce weather from New Archangel, Alaska, to Astoria, Oregon, the men struggle to avoid hostile Tlingit Indians, to fend off starvation and exhaustion, and to endure their own doubt and distrust. Based on an actual incident in 1853,
...15) Prairie Nocturne
Set in Seattle, San Francisco, Montana, and Alaska, Mountain Time is the Story of three intense relationships: between father and son, between sisters, and between lovers. Mitch Rozier who has spent half of his fifty years writing an environmental column for an alternative west coast paper, now finds himself back under his father's roof; the sisters Lexa and Mariah McCaskill wrestle with the past that has driven them away from domesticity: Lexa
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