From the streets of Danang, Vietnam, where a boy falls in with a young American missionary, to fishermen lost on the islands of Honduras, to the Canadian prairies, where an aging rancher finds himself smitten and a teenage boy's infatuation reveals his naiveté, the short stories in Here the Dark chronicle the geographies of both place and heart. Featuring a novella about a young woman torn between faith and doubt in a cloistered Mennonite community, David Bergen's latest deftly renders complex moral ambiguities and asks what it means to be lost-and how, through grace, we can be found.
Haunted by a horrible memory from the war, alone since his grown children moved out, Vietnam vet Charles Boatman returns to Vietnam thirty years after the war. Beautiful, smart, competent Ada follows her missing father to Vietnam. Her search for him tears her open in ways she could not have guessed, and Vietnam finds its way in. Shifting between the Pacific Northwest and Vietnam-between Charles' and Ada's points of view, their journeys become increasingly colorful and complex. The suspense builds, dreamlike, to a paradoxical climax of revelation and obfuscation, love and grief.
