The Whistling Season

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 promise of the Big Ditch-a gargantuan irrigation project intended to make the Montana prairie bloom. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is pressed into service, setting the stage for the "several kinds of education"-none of them of the textbook variety-Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three sons, and the rambunctious students in the region's one-room schoolhouse. A paean to a vanished way of life and the eccentric individuals and idiosyncratic institutions that made it fertile, The Whistling Season is Ivan Doig at his evocative best.

Whistling Season

Literature & Fiction

Ivan Doig

United States

Harcourt

The author of This House of Sky provides a magnificent evocation of the Pacific Northwest through the diaries of James Gilchrist Swan, a settler of the region. Doig fuses parts of the Swan diaries with his own journal.

Winter Brothers

Biographies & Memoirs

Travelers & Explorers

Harcourt, Brace. Jovanovich

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

Mariner Books

From a Scottish port, nineteen-year-olds Angus McCaskill and Rob Barclay embark on a new life in America as homesteaders in Montana, in this novel of the uncertainties of friendship and love

Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Dramas & Plays

Atheneum

The tale of a family of Scottish immigrants to Montana follows Jick McCaskill and his daughter Mariah on a tour through the state in the summer of its centennial year

Ride With Me Mariah Montana

Macmillian Publishing

RECORDED BOOKS^

With its powerful echoes of a family and its fate, Heart Earth is the fitting companion to Ivan Doig's classic memoir, This House of Sky. Against the backdrop of World War Two and the American land before and since, this remarkably told saga of the Doigs and their journey from a defense housing project in boomtime Arizona to the high country of their Montana origins builds with the drama only real life can hold. Here we see an adventurous mother miraculously back again in the evocative lines of her wartime letters after "all else of her. . . has been only farthest childscapes, half-rememberings thinned by so many years since"; a resonant father who gives off the "tense hum of a wire in the wind" as he strives, in memorably go-getting fashion, to make his family secure against chronic odds; and a child, "touchy and thorough, doctrinaire and dreamy," who early learns to infiltrate the drama-filled world of grown-ups by "standing back and prowling with the ears." "In that last winter of the war, she knew to use pointblank ink," begins this unusual blend of heartfelt memoir and narrative skills. As ever in the writing of Ivan Doig, the most innocent sentence has the trap of poetry. Heart Earth is the most imaginative - and moving - book yet from the writer, The Washington Post has said, "whose work makes readers recall why they love to read, reminds writers why they ever wanted to write in the first place."

Heart Earth

Arts & Literature

Ivan Doig has been hailed by the New York Times as "dean of Western American letters." In Ride with Me, Mariah Montana, widower Jick McCaskill, his daughter Mariah, and Mariah's ex-husband Riley take a road trip back and forth across Montana. As Jick recounts his memories of the area, Riley and Mariah fall in and out of love-and Jick unexpectedly discovers a new partner. "[Doig] displays a masterful skill in depicting the American West which few writers match." -Publishers Weekly

Ride with Me Mariah Montana

Work Song (Unabridged Audio CDs)

Time and again, Ivan Doig has proven himself to be a treasure of American letters. Critical darlings and New York Times best sellers, his novels target the heart of the human experience and never miss the mark. The Bartender' s Tale stars Tom Harry and his 12-year-old son, Rusty, who live alone and run a bar in a small Montana town in the early 1960s. Their lives are upended when Proxy, a woman from Tom's past, and her beatnik daughter, Francine, breeze into town. 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.

The Bartender's Tale [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ivan Doig. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ivan Doig

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ivan Doig. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Whistling Season

Winter Brothers

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Ride With Me Mariah Montana

Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Heart Earth

Ride with Me Mariah Montana

Work Song (Unabridged Audio CDs)

The Bartender's Tale [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition]