Ivan Doig – Bickerstaff Booksellers

Last Bus to Wisdom

Kim — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:58:43 +0000

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 is bossy, opinionated, argumentative, and tyrannical and 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 Doig 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.

Heart Earth

Kim — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:58:40 +0000

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

Kim — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:58:40 +0000

Readers will come to appreciate the strength and dignity of Berneta Ringer, a true Western heroine as Doig celebrates his mother’s life after finding a cache of her letters, photographs, and childhood writings. It begins with her first winter living in a tent in Montana’s Crazy Mountains to the ravages of the Depression on a ranch on Falkner Creek.

Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Kim — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 17:58:37 +0000

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 land seekers 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.