The Retreat - Tapa dura

Bestselling novelist David Bergen follows his Scotiabank Giller Prize—winning The Time in Between with a haunting novel about the clash of generations — and cultures.

In 1973, outside of Kenora, Ontario, Raymond Seymour, an eighteen-year-old Ojibway boy, is taken by a local policeman to a remote island and left for dead.

A year later, the Byrd family arrives in Kenora. They have come to stay at “the Retreat,” a commune run by the self-styled guru Doctor Amos. The Doctor is an enigmatic man who spouts bewildering truisms, and who bathes naked every morning in the pond at the edge of the Retreat while young Everett Byrd watches from the bushes. Lizzy, the eldest of the Byrd children, cares for her younger brothers Fish and William, and longs for what she cannot find at the Retreat. When Lizzy meets Raymond, everything changes, and Lizzy comes to understand the real difference between Raymond's world and her own. A tragedy and a love story, the novel moves towards a conclusion that is both astonishing and heartbreaking.

Set during the summer of the Ojibway occupation of Anicinabe Park in Kenora, The Retreat is a finely nuanced, deeply felt novel that tells the story of the complicated love between a white girl and a native boy, and of a family on the verge of splintering forever. It is also a story of the bond between two brothers who were separated in childhood, and whose lives and fates intertwine ten years later.

A brilliant portrait of a time and a place, The Retreat confirms Bergen's reputation as one of the country's most gifted and compelling writers.

David Bergen's award-winning fiction includes The Case of Lena S., winner of the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award and a finalist for the Governor General's Award, and The Time in Between, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. It was also named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. A member of the 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury, Bergen lives in Winnipeg.