Bucking the Sun: A Novel

Summary

Not since Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath has there been afamily saga as powerful as Bucking the Sun, nor a family as compellinglystrife-torn as the one at its center. Driven by drought from their Montana farmto “relief work” building the Fort Peck Dam, the Duff family spans the extremesof the times, from the eldest son Owen, who has made his way through college toan engineer’s job on the dam, to young Bruce, his antithesis, a risk-taker whoworks as a diver setting pilings into the treacherous river bottom. In betweenare Neil, the quiet one, and the brothers’ iron-willed wives. When a couple ofwild cards are introduced in the form of a Red Uncle from Scotland and theprostitute he takes up with, the plot gets as thick and turbulent as the muddyMissouri.

Bucking the Sun is a startling storyof mixed fortunes that races from moment to moment, an epic rendering of timeand place that reminds us why Ivan Doig is our foremost living storyteller ofthe American West.