The Bartender's Tale The Bartender's Tale
Two Medicine Country

The Bartender's Tale

    • 4.3 • 280 Ratings
    • $12.99

Publisher Description



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.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2012
August 21
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
400
Pages
PUBLISHER
Penguin Publishing Group
SELLER
PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.
SIZE
1.2
MB

Customer Reviews

Guidogal46 ,

Fun read

I love Ivan Doig’s writing. This was my third book of his. Characters are so real and well developed

Cochise77 ,

Just as good as the second time.

Definitely one of my favorite authors and I enjoy all the Montana stories. I’ve read this one twice and will doubtless come back to it again if I don’t end up in the marble farm myself first.

SusanH85 ,

Another wonderful page-turner

The only thing bad about this book is that I couldn’t put it down and got nothing else done until I finished it!

No as many twists and turns as in other books of Doig’s but still a splendid story. The way he fleshes out his characters and Montana (who’s is almost another character) is just so perfect.

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