Bergen back for book club seconds

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/05/2023 (1249 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Free Press Book Club is pleased to welcome back critically acclaimed Winnipeg novelist David Bergen to the next virtual meeting on Monday, May 29 at 7 p.m. to read from and discuss his award-winning novel Out of Mind.

Published by Goose Lane in September 2021, Out of Mind revisits the character of Lucille Black, who first appeared in Bergen’s 2010 Giller-shortlisted novel The Matter With Morris. In his latest, Lucille is at the centre of the story — a psychiatrist, mother and grandmother who ruminates on the death of her son Martin, travels to Thailand to check in on her daughter (who is falling in love with a man who may be a cult leader) and then to France, where she attends a wedding of a man she once thwarted.

In his review of Out of Mind for the Free Press, Neil Besner raved “Bergen has long been recognized for his spare and lean prose. His sculpted sentences are most often constituted via a remarkable alchemy: yearning, bleak stretches of absence, of loneliness and of pain become alloyed with a compassion and tenderness that seem first to emanate from a narrator’s oversight, but finally come to inhabit and inflect his characters as if these feelings were more truly their own… In Lucille, the signature Bergen worldview — always evoked at eye level through characters in charged relation — has centred itself in his most memorable woman, in the most eminently readable of all his fictions to date.”

Out of Mind won Bergen the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award at the 2022 Manitoba Book Awards — his second consecutive win of the prize, having nabbed the award the previous year for his short-story collection Here the Dark.

Bergen will be joined by Free Press reporter Ben Waldman, Chris Hall of McNally Robinson Booksellers and Free Press manager of engagement Erin Lebar for the virtual book club meeting on Monday, May 29 at 7 p.m. He will read from Out of Mind, discuss his work and answer questions from viewers and readers.

Copies of Out of Mind are available to purchase at McNally Robinson; there is no cost to join the book club and virtual discussion, which will be available to replay after the event on the Free Press YouTube channel.

To join the Free Press Book Club and for more information on current and future book picks, visit wfp.to/bookclub.