Harcourt, Inc.
Available: 05/18/06
6 x 9 · 304 pages
978-0-15-101237-4
CDN $28.00 · cl

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The Whistling Season

A Novel

Ivan Doig

“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 fall 1909. And so begins the unforgettable season that deposits the non-cooking, non-biting, ever-whistling Rose Llewellyn and her fount-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias Coulee along with homesteaders drawn by the promise of the Big Ditch, a gargantuan irrigation project that is supposed 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. His This House of Sky has sold a quarter million copies in North America.

Critically acclaimed as one of the greatest writers about the American West, Ivan Doig (Seattle) is the author of 10 previous books, including the novels Prairie Nocturne and Dancing at the Rascal Fair. A former ranch hand, newspaperman and magazine editor, he holds a PhD in history from the University of Washington.