Seattle author Ivan Doig is a writer and a storyteller. The first gets his words down on the page in a way that is a joy to read. The second helps him spin a yarn that skirts the line between truth and tall tale. The combination is a winning formula that has made him one of the most popular writers of our time.

His new novel, “The Whistling Season,” like many of his books, is set in Montana. The year is 1909, shortly before Halley’s Comet makes its 1910 appearance in the “Big Sky” above Montana, and across the world.

The story is narrated by Paul, who is the oldest child of the Milliron family. He lives with his father, Oliver, and brothers Damon and Toby in a cabin in Montana. The all-male family is struggling to adjust to life without their mother, who died suddenly. Avid readers of several newspapers, life takes a turn when Oliver reads an intriguing ad: “Can’t cook but doesn’t bite.”

Oliver decides they could use help, housekeeper Rose Llewellyn and her “font-of-knowledge” brother, Morris Morgan, enter their lives and nothing is the same. Rose indeed can’t cook, but she can whistle, which she does constantly. Morgan, with a dubious history but a head full of information, is soon pressed into service as a teacher in the one-room schoolhouse the boys attend. He introduces Paul to Latin, opening his world beyond the confines of the homestead.

They say that Latin is a dead language, but it comes alive on the pages of “The Whistling Season,” and it has a place in Doig’s heart.

“I had a powerful (Latin) teacher in high school,” Doig said in a recent phone interview from his Seattle home. “She made us diagram sentences in Latin. Now there’s taking the language apart to see how it works. It was extremely valuable to me.”

Paul, a precocious seventh-grader, is introduced to Latin by Morgan, who realizes the boy needs a challenge.

“Latin is Paul’s Internet,” Doig said. “It’s his entry into the world of language making, the roots and facility of language that he hasn’t had. He had no TV or radio, but he had this magic box of Latin.”

Paul goes on to become Montana Superintendent of Schools, and visits his old school while making the hardest decision of his life — whether to discontinue the one-room schoolhouse system. The book is a reminiscence of his school memories.

Doig also grew up in Montana, and while Paul’s persona as the classroom prodigy is a “mental fingerprint” of the author’s experience, Paul is not based on Doig’s life.

“I had no siblings and I didn’t go to a one-room school. I was more isolated than Paul,” Doig said.

Doig’s background includes an undergraduate degree in journalism and a Ph.D in history, both of which are valuable in his writing career.

History plays a big part in his stories, and “The Whistling Season” is no exception.

“There is almost always some historical force of gravity,” Doig said. He likes to examine the question, “How do people do the best they can against the vaster circumstances of the world?”

This latest novel is set during the last homestead frontier, the opening up of Montana to settlers at the turn of the 20th century, who arrived by train, not wagon. Oliver Milliron works hauling freight for the “Big Dig,” a major irrigation ditch that will carry water to previously unfarmable arid land.

Doig is known for the lyrical quality of his writing; how he says it is as important as what he says. This quality is at its most delightful in his descriptions of the characters. Rose steps from the train “all swathed in a traveling dress the shade of blue flame — Minnesota evidently did not lack for satin — and there did not seem to be an extra ounce anywhere on her pert frame. In fact, I had noticed Father give a double look as if there must be more of her somewhere.”

Oliver Milliron makes coffee that is “so strong it is almost ambulatory, which he gulped down from suppertime to bedtime and then slept serenely as a sphinx.”

Yet the author said he saves his most lyrical writing for non-fiction, such as his award-winning first book, “This House of Sky.”

With non-fiction, he explained, there is already a groundwork of facts, “so I can then spin the language as fully as I can on top of that,” he said. “With fiction, you better have a beginning, middle and end. The characters need portrayal, history needs clean elucidation, you have to create a setting. I seem to have to shift down just slightly and concentrate on the story.”

“Just slightly” is the key phrase here. “The Whistling Season” is told with the high quality of writing, rich language and passion for detail that readers have come to expect from Doig, who was written 11 books and countless magazine articles.

“The Whistling Season,” released just two months ago, is on its third printing from publisher Harcourt and is the No. 1 seller at Booksense, the list for independent booksellers.

Ivan Doig will read from and sign “The Whistling Season” 7:30 p.m. July 6 at Eagle Harbor Books, 157 Winslow Way E., Bainbridge Island.