Description
A Washington Post and Seattle Times pick forxa0Best of 2012 Fiction Booklist Editors' Choice for 2012 Library Journal Best Book for Teens 2012 “Doig cranks into motion a dense valentine of a novel about a father and a small town at the start of the 1960s… Doig writes the tenderness between Rusty and his father vividly, and his facility with natural, vernacular dialogue is often hypnotizing… The Bartender's Tale is thoroughly engaging, and the book's soft focus of nostalgia is in itself a kind of pleasure.” – NPR “Pick it up, lose yourself in the past and remember what it was like to be 12 years old, when your world and all the people who entered into it felt as fresh as the Montana mountain air.” – The Associated Press “Doig is at his best with coming-of-age stories. And he is masterful at exploring the emotional complexities of family and community through the eyes of a precocious youth… [He] has fashioned a moving tale of tolerance, self-discovery and forgiveness in which a child comes to terms with his own origins and in the process opens a new door to his future.” – The Seattle Times “With this expert novel, [Doig] sets himself a larger canvas and fills it with a diverse cast… Fact and fiction are skillfully fused to document a boy’s last days of youth and a history his father can’t leave behind… Rusty’s youthful adventures are enchanting, but Doig does something more—he punctuates them with the colorful local idiom of his father’s grizzled punters.” – Newsweek/Daily Beast “Doig expertly spins out [the] various narrative threads with his usual gift for bringing history alive in the odysseys of marvelously thorny characters… Possibly the best novel yet by one of America’s premier storytellers.”xa0– Kirkus (starred review) “Highly textured and evocative… Doig gives us a poignant saga of a boy becoming a man alongside a town and a bygone way of life inching into the modern era. "xa0– Publishers Weekly (starred review)xa0 “[The] rewards of The Bartender’s Tale —a subtle and engaging narrative, characters who behave the way real people behave, the joys of careful and loving observation—remain very great and extremely rare.“ – The Washington Post “[An] enjoyable, old-fashioned, warmhearted story about fathers and sons, growing up, and big life changes.” – Library Journal "Essential reading for anyone who cares about western literature."xa0– Booklist (starred review)xa0 "Ivan Doig's new novel reveals why he's considered one of fiction's premiere storytellers." – Barnes & Noble Review PRAISExa0FOR WORKxa0SONG "As enjoyable and subtly thought-provoking a piece of fiction as you're likely to pick up this summer. It's a book that can be appreciated just for the quality of the prose and the author's adherence to the sturdy conventions of old-fashioned narrative or for Doig's sly gloss on Western genre fiction and unforced evocation of our current condition—or, better yet, for all those things… A pleasure to read.” – The Los Angeles Times "Not one stitch unravels in this intricately threaded narrative… infectious." – The New York Times Book Review “If you were looking for a novel that best expresses the American spirit, you’d have to ride past a lot of fence posts before finding anything as worthy as Work Song .” – Chicago Tribune “Doig has delivered another compelling tale about America, epic as an Old West saga but as fresh and contemporary as the news.” – Seattle Times “Richly imagined and beautifully paced.” – Associated Press (also ran in San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere) “A classic tale from the heyday of American capitalism by the king of the Western novel.” – The Daily Beast (Hot Reads) PRAISE FOR THE WHISTLING SEASON "Along with his much praised, incantatory gifts for evoking quintessentially American prairie life and history, the National Book Award finalist brings… a bushel and peck of irresistible characters, each so full of spunk, wit, ambition or sheer orneriness that not one of them will lie down on the page and sleep for a moment… Both elegiac and life-affirming, The Whistling Season takes the chill out of today's literary winds."xa0– Los Angeles Times Book Review "[Doig’s] writing is as well crafted as the best carpentry. The Whistling Season does what Doig does best: evoke the past and create a landscape and characters worth caring about… it's lovely storytelling, whether you're in Montana or New York." – USA Today "A deeply meditated and achieved art." – New York Times Book Review "Doig is in the best sense an old-fashioned novelist: You feel as if you’re in the hands of an absolute expert at story-making, a hard-hewn frontier version of Walter Scott or early Dickens. The landscape and characters are vivid, the prose flawless, and like the earlier masters, Doig imbues each scene and his spacious story with deep emotional understanding and a sense of possibility and personal adventure. The Whistling Season is a book that strives for more than beauty, which it achieves: It reaches for joy."xa0– O, The Oprah Magazine A third-generation Montanan,xa0Ivan Doig is the authorxa0of xa0thirteen previous books,xa0including the Indieboundxa0bestseller Work Song and thexa0classic memoir This House ofxa0Sky . He has been a National Book Award finalistxa0and has received the Wallace Stegner Award,xa0among many other honors. He lives in Seattle.
Features & Highlights
- 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.
