Vorab-RezensentenIvan Doig

Enter to win one of 25 advance reading copies of Ivan Doig's SWEET THUNDER. A beloved character brings the power of the press to 1920s Butte, Montana, in this latest from the best storyteller of the West In the winter of 1920, a quirky bequest draws Morrie Morgan back to Butte, Montana, from a year-long honeymoon with his bride, Grace. But the mansion bestowed by a former boss upon the itinerant charmer, who debuted in Doig’s bestselling The Whistling Season, promises to be less windfall than money pit. And the town itself, with its polyglot army of miners struggling to extricate themselves from the stranglehold of the ruthless Anaconda Copper Mining Company, seems—like the couple’s fast-diminishing finances—on the verge of implosion. These twin dilemmas catapult Morrie into his new career as editorialist for the Thunder, the fledgling union newspaper that dares to play David to Anaconda’s Goliath. Amid the clatter of typewriters, the rumble of the printing presses, and a cast of unforgettable characters, Morrie puts his gift for word-slinging to work. As he pursues victory for the miners, he discovers that he is enmeshed in a deeply personal battle as well—the struggle to win lasting love for himself. Brilliantly capturing an America roaring into a new age, Sweet Thunder is another great tale from a classic American novelist.

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.

“If America was a melting pot, Butte would be its boiling point.” In 1919, Morrie Morris--last seen making a colorful exit from the one-room schoolhouse in Doig’s long-fictionalized Marias Coulee, Montana, in The Whistling Season--steps off the platform in Butte, a town both figuratlively and literally booming, thanks to the "copper collar" the mining behemoth Anaconda has around its neck. But even on "The Richest Hill on Earth" riches elude Morrie once again, while the complications of a town seething with suspicion seem to seek him out. After a stint as a funeral cryer, he finds a perch in the town library, repository of a surprising literary lode and meeting point for a host of colorful local characters, including another memorable Whistling Season character, Morrie’s erstwhile student Rabrab Rellis. Now a teacher herself, and engaged to a fiery young union leader, Rabrab leads Morrie deeper into the miners’ intrigues, just as he is falling more deeply under the spell of his boarding-house landlady, the aptly named Grace. As tensions above and below ground reach the combustion point, Morrie comes to the rescue of the beleaguered miners in an unexpected and once again distinctively Doig-ishly satisfying way.