Bucking the Sun

This American historical novel “takes you over as you read it, invading your daydreams, lodging its cadences in your brain, summoning you back to the page” (The Washington Post).

Bucking the Sun is the saga of the Duff family, homesteaders driven from the Montana bottomland to work on one of the New Deal’s most audacious projects—the damming of the Missouri River.

Through the story of each family member—a wrathful father, a mettlesome mother, and three very different sons, and the memorable women they marry—Ivan Doig conveys a sense of time and place that is at once epic in scope and rich in detail.

“Vintage Doig.” —Publishers Weekly

“An intense family drama. This richly detailed narrative offers comedy, passion, and adventure.” —Library Journal

“An intriguing chapter . . . in the history of the West.” —Booklist

“Doig’s real achievement is to chronicle—with empathy and precise, lyrical authority, down to the last load of gravel hauled in a sturdy Ford truck—the magnificent Fort Peck project and the desperate times out of which it arose.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Ivan Doig is one of the best we’ve got—a muscular and exceedingly good writer.” —E. Annie Proulx author of Accordion Crimes and The Shipping News

“The premier writer of the American West.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“As tangled a web of familial and psychosexual rivalries as one is apt to encounter this side of Hamlet or The Brothers Karamazov.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Doig has achieved his most adroit blend of fact and fancy in what is perhaps his best book since This House of Sky. . . . fact and anecdote are woven into the text with a light and often humorous touch.” —San Francisco Chronicle