Here the Dark
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK • A GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 100 BOOK FOR 2020 • A CBC BEST FICTION BOOK FOR 2020 • "His third appearance on the Giller shortlist ... affirms Bergen among Canada's most powerful writers. His pages light up; all around falls into darkness."—2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury • “David Bergen’s command is breathtaking … His work belongs to the world, and to all time. He is one of our living greats.”—Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves
From the streets of Danang, Vietnam, where a boy falls in with a young American missionary, to fishermen lost off the islands of Honduras, to the Canadian prairies, where a teenage boy’s infatuation reveals his naiveté and an aging rancher finds himself smitten, the short stories in Here the Dark explore the spaces between doubt and belief, evil and good, obscurity and light. Following men and boys bewildered by their circumstances and swayed by desire, surprised by love and by their capacity for both tenderness and violence, and featuring a novella about a young woman who rejects the laws of her cloistered Mennonite community, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner David Bergen’s latest deftly renders complex moral ambiguities and asks what it means to be lost—and how we might be found.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In his breathtaking new book, novelist David Bergen (Giller Prize–winning The Time In Between) has no qualms about testing his characters’ beliefs, from a Vietnamese boy in a surprising relationship with an American missionary to a young Christian hoping to teach Indigenous Canadian teens about Jesus—only to become the student himself. This exploration of faith’s role in our lives is particularly moving in the title novella, about a Mennonite woman’s wrenching struggle between her duty to her deeply conservative community and her own burning thirst for knowledge. Bergen’s style is as gorgeously spare as the Manitoba prairie, each vivid moment hitting without a single word out of place. Incisive and poetic, Here the Dark makes a deep emotional impact.
