The Eleventh Man - Hardcover

Driven by the memory of a fallen teammate, TSU’s 1941 starting lineup went down as legend in 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 eleventh man, Ben Reinking, has been plucked from pilot training by a military propaganda machine hungry for heroes. He is to chronicle the adventures of his teammates, man by man, for publication in small-town newspapers across the country like the one his father edits. Ready for action, he chafes at the assignment, not knowing that it will bring him love from an unexpected quarter and test the law of averages, which holds that all but one of his teammates should come through the conflict unscathed.

A deeply American story, The Eleventh Man is Ivan Doig’s most powerful novel to date.

PRAISE FOR THE WHISTLING SEASON 

"Evocative . . . Doig offers a gentle appreciation of the secrets beneath the surface of everyday life, set against a Western landscape that is described in concrete detail."?The New Yorker  

"Both elegiac and life-affirming, The Whistling Season takes the chill out of today's literary winds."?Los Angeles Times Book Review  

"A deeply meditated and achieved art."?New York Times Book Review  

"The Whistling Season does what Doig does best: evoke the past and create a landscape and characters worth caring about . . . it's lovely storytelling."?USA Today   

"Doig is in the best sense an old-fashioned novelist: You feel as if you're in the hands of an absolute expert at story-making, a hard-hewn frontier version of Walter Scott or early Dickens."--O, The Oprah Magazine  

"Courageous . . . charming . . . When a voice as pleasurable as [Doig's] evokes a lost era, somehow it doesn't seem so lost after all."--The Washington Post Book World