When Johnny Fehr, a down-on-his-luck feed supply salesman, thinks about Lorraine, his lover, it’ s like the Holy Spirit tickling his spine. But Johnny is already married to Charlene. If only he could be a better person and stop hurting the people he loves. In this richly layered novel, David Bergen depicts the small prairie town of Lesser, where everybody’ s private moments become public knowledge.

Amazon.com Review
Lesser is the name of a fictional small town just outside of Winnepeg, and Johnny Fehr is the name of David Bergen's protagonist in his accomplished first novel, A Year of Lesser. Johnny is a drinker, a doper, a womanizer in a place small enough for everyone to know all about his sins. At the beginning of the novel, Johnny's father commits suicide; by the end, he has lost everything that ever mattered to him: wife, lover, and friends. But Bergen's novel is not really about the changes in Johnny's fortunes, but rather, the changes in his soul. Johnny, raised in the rigid strictures of the Mennonite faith, may be a sinner, but he's a sinner with a powerful yearning for grace.

How Johnny Fehr stumbles his way toward that state of grace despite the town's malice and his own weakness is at the heart of A Year of Lesser. In Johnny Fehr, David Bergen has created a flawed yet deeply human character, one of whom readers will acknowledge "there, but for the grace of God, go I."