The Eleventh Man

By Ivan Doig
(Mariner Books, Paperback, 9780547247632, 416pp.)

Publication Date: September 2009

Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Hardcover, Hardcover

Categories: General

Selected by Indie Booksellers for the November 2008 Indie Next List

“A football team that makes the papers in 1941 goes to war in 1943, its players deployed from Europe to the Pacific -- all but the quarterback, who, son of a journalist, is assigned to chronicle their exploits for the wartime propaganda machine he loathes. Indelibly wrought characters and a plot that mixes love, treason, heroism, and history make this a blissfully good read.”

-- Betsy Burton, The King's English, Salt Lake City, UT

Description

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.

About the Author

Ivan Doig was born in Montana and grew up along the Rocky Mountain Front, the dramatic landscape that has inspired much of his writing. A finalist for the 1979 National Book Award and one of the nominees worldwide for the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, he is the author of eight previous novels, most recently The Whistling Season, and three works of nonfiction, including This House of Sky.

Praise For The Eleventh Man…

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE ELEVENTH MAN "The Eleventh Man is about loyalty and survival and sacrifice--and love--and remains intensely suspenseful and moving throughout."--Scott Turow PRAISE FOR THE WHISTLING SEASON "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

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