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 Manis Ivan Doig’s most powerful novel to date.
A riveting WWII drama in which a pilot trainee is ordered to chronicle the adventures of his former high school football teammates, now scattered across the globe as soldiers.
ADVANCE PRAISE FORTHE ELEVENTH MAN
The Eleventh Manis about loyalty and survival and sacrifice--and love--and remains intensely suspenseful and moving throughout. --Scott Turow
PRAISE FORTHE 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
Ivan Doig was born in MonlC