A national bestseller, the story of “a boy’s last days of youth and a history his father can’t leave behind” (The Daily Beast).
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 in 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. The Bartender’s Tale wonderfully captures how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.
Industry Reviews
"The perfect book for your bedside table. Pick it up, lose yourself in the past and remember what it was like to be twelve years old, when your world and all the people who entered into it felt as fresh as the Montana mountain air." -"Associated Press" "[The] rewards of "The Bartender's Tale"--a subtle and engaging narrative, characters who behave the way real people behave, the joys of careful and loving observation--remain very great and extremely rare." -"The Washington Post" "Doig cranks into motion a dense valentine of a novel about a father and a small town at the start of the 1960s... Doig writes the tenderness between Rusty and his father vividly, and his facility with natural, vernacular dialogue is often hypnotizing... "The Bartender's Tale" is thoroughly engaging, and the book's soft focus of nostalgia is in itself a kind of pleasure." -NPR "Doig is at his best with coming-of-age stories. And he is masterful at exploring the emotional complexities of family and community through the eyes of a precocious youth... [He] has fashioned a moving tale of tolerance, self-discovery and forgiveness in which a child comes to terms with his own origins and in the process opens a new door to his future." -"The Seattle Times" "With this expert novel, [Doig] sets himself a larger canvas and fills it with a diverse cast... Fact and fiction are skillfully fused to document a boy's last days of youth and a history his father can't leave behind... Rusty's youthful adventures are enchanting, but Doig does something more--he punctuates them with the colorful local idiom of his father's grizzled punters." -"Newsweek/Daily Beast ""Essential reading for anyone who cares about western literature." -"Booklist "(starred review) "Doig expertly spins out [the] various narrative threads with his usual gift for bringing history alive in the odysseys of marvelously thorny characters... Possibly the best novel yet by one of America's premier storytellers." -"Kirkus "(starred review) "Highly textured and evocative... Doig gives us a poignant saga of a boy becoming a man alongside a town and a bygone way of life inching into the modern era. " -"Publishers Weekly "(starred review) "[An] enjoyable, old-fashioned, warmhearted story about fathers and sons, growing up, and big life changes." -"Library Journal"
