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This House of Sky
- Landscapes of a Western Mind
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Art & Literature
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Read this as book two and Dancing as book one
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New Favorite
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The Whistling Season
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When a widowed rancher hires a housekeeper to help with his three young sons, he finds her to be cheerful and competent. Yet she is concealing a colorful and infamous past. Filled with humor and hardship, this novel sings with what the author calls "a poetry of the vernacular". A finalist for the National Book award, Ivan Doig, who has published 11 books, has been hailed as the "West's preeminent literary novelist" by the Denver Post.
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The Bartender's Tale
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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.
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a sweet, old fashioned coming-of-age story
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Work Song
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National Book Award finalist and Wallace Stegner Award winner Ivan Doig has garnered critical and popular acclaim for his vibrant, authentic tales of the American West. In Work Song he takes listeners to Butte, Montana, in 1919 for the tale of one charmer’s efforts to elude Chicago gangsters.
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good follow-up to The Whistling Season
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Ride with Me, Mariah Montana
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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.
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Laugh, cry, think...you'll do it all!
- By Joe Wittwer on 07-27-12
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English Creek
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Part of Ivan Doig’s acclaimed Montana trilogy, English Creek revolves around Jick McCaskill, a 14-year-old growing up in 1930s Montana. This incandescent coming-of-age tale dramatizes the climatic events of one summer that inevitably mark Jick’s awakening from childhood to adulthood.
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Read this as book two and Dancing as book one
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Dancing at the Rascal Fair
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- Narrated by: Robert Ian MacKenzie
- Length: 19 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Dancing at the Rascal Fair by National Book Award nominee Ivan Doig captures the passion and tenacity of turn-of-the-century immigrants struggling to build new lives amidst Montana’s windswept Rockies. The tale unfolds into a contest of the heart between Anna Ramsay and Angus McCaskill—kept apart by obligations—as they and their stormy kin vie to tame the brutal land.
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New Favorite
- By Dana C. Nicolay on 05-28-10
By: Ivan Doig
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The Whistling Season
- By: Ivan Doig
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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When a widowed rancher hires a housekeeper to help with his three young sons, he finds her to be cheerful and competent. Yet she is concealing a colorful and infamous past. Filled with humor and hardship, this novel sings with what the author calls "a poetry of the vernacular". A finalist for the National Book award, Ivan Doig, who has published 11 books, has been hailed as the "West's preeminent literary novelist" by the Denver Post.
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Wordplay
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By: Ivan Doig
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The Bartender's Tale
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- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
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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.
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a sweet, old fashioned coming-of-age story
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By: Ivan Doig
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Work Song
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- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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National Book Award finalist and Wallace Stegner Award winner Ivan Doig has garnered critical and popular acclaim for his vibrant, authentic tales of the American West. In Work Song he takes listeners to Butte, Montana, in 1919 for the tale of one charmer’s efforts to elude Chicago gangsters.
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good follow-up to The Whistling Season
- By Elizabeth on 12-23-12
By: Ivan Doig
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Ride with Me, Mariah Montana
- By: Ivan Doig
- Narrated by: Scott Sowers
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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.
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Laugh, cry, think...you'll do it all!
- By Joe Wittwer on 07-27-12
By: Ivan Doig
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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, debuted in Doig’s best-selling book The Whistling Season, promises to be less a windfall than a 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.
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Ivan Doig at his best
- By Mama bear on 02-01-14
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Last Bus to Wisdom
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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 11-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.
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Ivan Doig was getting older
- By Starr Callies on 01-13-16
By: Ivan Doig
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Bucking the Sun
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Acclaimed for his beloved Montana trilogy, National Book Award finalist Ivan Doig crafts masterful portraits of life in rural Big Sky Country. Set in the 1930s, Bucking the Sun follows the Duff clan during the construction of the Fort Peck Dam. Hugh Duff is angry that the dam will flood his farm, yet his sons hasten to get jobs working on the project.
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Almost Good
- By Elaine R. Rose on 06-24-19
By: Ivan Doig
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Heart Earth
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
National Book Award finalist Ivan Doig had only a vague memory of his mother until he discovered a cache of her letters. They revealed a passionate, can-do woman who loved the lilting rhythm of words. A moving prequel to his acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, Doig’s Heart Earth highlights his childhood before his mother’s death and eloquently captures the texture of the American West, the fortunes of a family, and one woman’s indomitable spirit.
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Like a warm blanket on a chilly night.
- By Bonpierce on 09-28-18
By: Ivan Doig
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Mountain Time
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Often hailed as the heir apparent to Wallace Stegner, Ivan Doig is among the finest chroniclers of the contemporary American West. In Mountain Time, Lexa McCaskell and Mitch Rozier leave their Seattle home to visit Mitch’s dying father in Montana. There Mitch clashes with both Lexa and his father as events from the past are explored and difficult memories resurface.
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A Time in the Mountains.
- By Bill on 02-10-15
By: Ivan Doig
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The Eleventh Man
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- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Driven by the memory of a fallen teammate, TSU's 1941 starting lineup made Montana football history, charging through the season undefeated. Two years later, the "Supreme Team" is caught up in World War II. Ten of them are scattered around the globe in the war's various lonely and dangerous theaters. The 11th man, Ben Reinking, has been plucked from pilot training by a military propaganda machine hungry for heroes.
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All unfair in love and war
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By: Ivan Doig
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A River Runs Through It
- By: Norman Maclean
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Performance
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Story
A River Runs Through It is a universal story of family love and a lyrical masterpiece, as beautiful as the great trout rivers of western Montana upon which it is set. Its beauty is especially evident through the "near-perfect match" of reader Ivan Doig and author Norman MacLean.
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Lyrical - wonderfully done
- By John on 05-27-05
By: Norman Maclean
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Prairie Nocturne
- By: Ivan Doig
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- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
National Book Award finalist Ivan Doig writes about Big Sky country with raw authenticity. Set during the 1920s, Prairie Nocturne finds Susan Duff, the young songbird from Doig’s Dancing at the Rascal Fair, now a middle-aged singing coach living in Helena. When her old flame, Wes Williamson, asks her to mentor his black chauffeur, Monty, she agrees. But racial tensions erupt when Susan’s private lessons with Monty attract the attention of the KKK.
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Loved it.
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By: Ivan Doig
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Blind Your Ponies
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Story
Sam Pickett never expected to settle in this dried-up shell of a town on the western edge of the world. He’s come here to hide from the violence and madness that have shattered his life, but what he finds is what he least expects. It seems that every inhabitant of this forgotten outpost has a story, a reason for taking a detour to this place—or a reason for staying.
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Good Listen
- By Tracy Jordan on 03-03-12
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Angle of Repose
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Performance
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Story
Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, and husbands and wives.
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Not too many novels written about marriage
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By: Wallace Stegner
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A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
- By: Norman Maclean
- Narrated by: David Manis
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- Unabridged
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Story
In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean claims that “in my family, there is no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.” Nor is there a clear line between family and fly-fishing. It is the one activity where brother can connect with brother and father with son, bridging troubled relationships at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana. In Maclean’s autobiographical novella, it is the river that makes them realize that life continues and all things are related.
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Loved the Movie- and the Short Story is Better!
- By Joe on 08-10-14
By: Norman Maclean
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Next to Last Stand
- Walt Longmire Mysteries, Book 16
- By: Craig Johnson
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 7 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
One of the most viewed paintings in American history, Custer's Last Fight, copied and distributed by Anheuser-Busch at a rate of more than two million copies a year, was destroyed in a fire at the 7th Cavalry Headquarters in Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1946. Or was it? When Charley Lee Stillwater dies of an apparent heart attack at the Wyoming Home for Soldiers & Sailors, Walt Longmire is called in to try and make sense of a piece of a painting and a Florsheim shoebox containing a million dollars, sending the good sheriff on the trail of a dangerous art heist.
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Historical misinformation, Fascinating!
- By shelley on 09-23-20
By: Craig Johnson
Publisher's Summary
A nominee for the National Book Award, Ivan Doig's brilliant memoir shares the experiences and culture that shaped his early years and made him fall in love with the West. From his childhood in a family of homesteaders through the death of his mother and his move to Montana to herd sheep, Doig shows his intimate connection with the American West.
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What listeners say about This House of Sky
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Doggy Bird
- 09-06-14
Early work by a favorite author
This was my first audio version though I have enjoyed reading the books of Ivan Doig for many years. Most of his books take place in the Montana of early to mid-20th century and are as strange and fascinating for me as the stories of medieval knights. They bring me the kind of pleasure that I felt as a child reading the "Little House" books, but with much more mature themes and very beautiful, often poetic language.
I think Tom Stechschulte does a very good job of reading with a natural but flat drawl that I associate with this region of the country and with an earlier and slower time. This particular book is interesting because it describes Doig's journey in becoming a writer. It is a tribute to his parents and grandparents and to the way of life that his family for generations had known. This way of life had already begun to disappear at the time this book was written and Doig was conscious of chronicling the end of an era in this work. He taped his father's and grandmother's recollections as he progressed, knowing these were memories that held in them a way of life that was disappearing. I was sometimes surprised when modern technology shows its face in a book filled with stories that could not have been much different a hundred years before. The challenges faced, hard weather and stubborn animals, are eternal and help to make the stories timeless and yet there is an aspect of them very bound by time since few Americans today grow up with a childhood like this one that occurred not much before most of us were children.
I think the emotion in the stories, the connection between the family members who spend a lot of time struggling with one another as well as with nature is another reason I enjoyed the memoir. It demonstrates an intense but unsentimental bond I found very appealing. The stories recount Doig's memories of his life with his father after his mother died, from the age of 6 or 7 until college and Doig's burgeoning conscience of his rejection of this life.
When his father becomes ill his maternal grandmother joins the journey and the three of end up together -more or less- and the stories of their isolated, hard working lives driving sheep and repairing fences, working in the shadow of awesome mountains and catastrophes make for fascinating reading most of the time. There are a few stories where the memoir slows down in the middle - where the fact that this is Doig's first full length book becomes evident, but that is a small price to pay for this very engaging memoir and story of Montana. Doig's use of language and investigation of memory also distinguish this memoirs from those of many less talented writers that seem to appear more and more frequently these days. Highly recommended for readers who appreciate beautiful writing and stories of other way of life.
10 people found this helpful
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- Julianna J Mathers
- 01-03-19
An epic tale...
One of the best books I have ever listened to. The writing is vivid and paints a 3D picture of the Montana of Doig’s youth. Can’t wait to listen to it again!
3 people found this helpful
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- Michelle
- 12-23-18
Love this book!
The narrator was fantastic. I can still hear him in my head. The book is so full of memories, not just Mr Doig's but mine. My mother's family came from Scotland and some of the words a phrases jumped out at me like a very welcome present. Honyakers is a word I remember well and miss hearing from my mom. Thank you Mr Doig, for sharing your father and Lady with us.
3 people found this helpful
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- Patrick Alexander
- 08-24-20
The narration is as near perfect as I have heard.
This book by Doig is already well-known as a masterpiece and there is nothing more for me to say there. If you have heard good things about it, they are correct; otherwise, you have been misled. Having listened to many audiobooks and having a few times, including 'This Land of Sky', both read the written work and listened to the audiobook, I'm prompted to write a review here by my deep appreciation of Tom Stechschulte's work. It is excellent. In his reading, the book is better than I had remembered. Stechschulte joins Edoardo Ballerini's reading of Knausgaard, John Vaillant's reading of his own work, and Wil Wheaton's reading of Ready Player One on my short list of the best examples of the narratorial art.
2 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-14-20
Doig exudes love for his family, land, & history
I guess my favorite parts were about sheep herding in Montana, both in Doig's earliest years and I. his teens. what a unique experience! So profoundly tied to the land and weather. I feel very soft by any comparison. his dad and grandmother walk right out of the book into your heart. Great narration, too.
1 person found this helpful
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- Kirk A Mann
- 02-23-20
Gorgeous Autobiography
Beautiful story of family, ranching, Montana, an old way of loving. Very moving and earthy story.
1 person found this helpful
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- Anne Tunnell
- 09-28-19
Exceptional writing
I loved the story but it was really Doig's descriptive writing that reeled me in.
The narrator also made the characters come alive!
1 person found this helpful
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- DeAnn
- 09-11-19
The Best Book I've Ever Listened To
My highest recommendation for This House of Sky. Through his spare but masterful use of language Doig can paint a magnificent picture, create rich characters and weave an epic, strong story. With such outstanding writing and the best narration I've ever listened to This House of Sky is one my three top Audible books. I will re-listen to this book many times in the future!
1 person found this helpful
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- Wendy
- 03-09-21
As absorbing as a novel
After so thoroughly enjoying Dancing at the Rascal Fair, I wondered if I could enjoy This House of Sky as much. I did! There are similarities in setting and approach: what interesting studies of relationships, and what interesting comparisons and contrasts with Stegner’s Big Rock Candy Mountain. This is a first-rate lifelong list book!
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- CA
- 02-09-21
Stirred many memories and emotions
For me to have stumbled onto This House of Sky by chance seems quite improbable. Again and again throughout my listening, I pictured my own father (and me in some situations) as both Doigs, father and son. Love the writing style that gives such eloquent and efficient treatment to homespun, back country, ranch life vocabulary and phrases. Anxious to discover more from Ivan Doig.