Trying Situations

Raised in Niverville, in a devoutly Mennonite household, the son of a Mennonite pastor, David Bergen still calls Manitoba home. In his fiction, he raises fundamental questions about religious belief and prevailing doubt in the modern world. Honoured and celebrated with many awards, he is one of Canada’s foremost writers.

Bergen published his first novel, A Year of Lesser, in 1996. Occurring in the four seasons of one year, it watches the machinations of an apparently unspiritual man, an alcoholic and a philanderer, as he copes with the death of his wife and the pregnancy of his lover in the town of Lesser (a thinly disguised Niverville). Eighteen years later, with his eighth novel, Leaving Tomorrow, Bergen published a classic Bildungsroman, without his usual autobiographical connections. Brought up in the fictional town of Tomorrow, Alberta, the first-person narrator, a sensitive individual who lives in the realm of words and writing, reveals...