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Monday, 6 of September of 2010

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Book of the Week # 10 WORK SONG by Ivan Doig

   

 July 16 – Work Song

by Ivan Doig

 Book of the Week #10

 

(Riverhead; $25.95 hardcover; 275 pages ) 

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A new book for lover’s of Ivan Doig and the great state of Montana. Set in Butte in 1919, Doig’s latest work follows the story of Morrie Morris  (Whistling Season 2006). Yet another wonderful tale of the west, this book is soon to be a new favorite!

 “Recommend this to everyone you know; essential.”

—Library Journal

 
“Ivan Doig is an exemplary regional voice in American letters, which simply means he is a very fine writer who has chosen to site his work in the West, particularly in Montana, where he was born and grew up. “Work Song” is his 10th novel — a sequel to his bestselling “The Whistling Season” — and as enjoyable and subtly thought-provoking a piece of fiction as you’re likely to pick up this summer.”

—Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times
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An award-winning and beloved novelist of the American West spins the further adventures of a favorite character, in one of his richest historical settings yet.


“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 decade later, Morrie is back in Montana, as the beguiling narrator of Work Song.
Lured like so many others by “the richest hill on earth,” Morrie steps off the train in Butte, copper-mining capital of the world, in its jittery heyday of 1919. But while riches elude Morrie, once again a colorful cast of local characters-and their dramas-seek him out: a look-alike, sound-alike pair of retired Welsh miners; a streak-of-lightning waif so skinny that he is dubbed Russian Famine; a pair of mining company goons; a comely landlady propitiously named Grace; and an eccentric boss at the public library, his whispered nickname a source of inexplicable terror. When Morrie crosses paths with a lively former student, now engaged to a fiery young union leader, he is caught up in the mounting clash between the iron-fisted mining company, radical “outside agitators,” and the beleaguered miners. And as tensions above ground and below reach the explosion point, Morrie finds a unique way to give a voice to those who truly need one.
“The most tumultous, quirky, and fascinating city in the American West of the last century has finally found a storyteller equal to its stories. … Ivan Doig brings to life the core of humanity, and a hell of cast, amidst the shadows and sorrows of Butte, Montana — a city that could say it never slept well before New York made a similar claim.”-Tim Egan, author of “The Last Hard Time and The Big Burn”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Ivan Doig grew up in a family of Montana ranch hands during the 1940s and ’50s. The author of ten books, including the acclaimed novels that make up the Montana Trilogy — -”English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana- — “he lives with his wife in Seattle.

REVIEWS & RESOURCES 

  • The author’s website
  • New York Times Review
  • Los Angeles Times Review

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    Date: July 16th, 2010 @ 15:00

    Categories: news