Wiseman’s Wager

From an emergency room in Calgary, where an intern hears his poorly timed joke about suicide, Zan winds up on the psychologist’s couch. But the doctor’s efforts to investigate Zan’s mental state are constantly stymied by his misfiring memory, his wry delivery, and his novelist’s tendency to embellish. Is he misremembering, misrepresenting, crafting a better story or all of the above? Through the streets of Strike-era Winnipeg, Toronto during the Depression, and the 1980s Calgary of Zan’s new life, Dave Margoshes’s compellingly unreliable narrator treats the reader to a magnificent meditation on aging, family ties, faith, and the liquid concept of the truth.

AUTHOR

Dave Margoshes

Dave Margoshes is a fiction writer and poet living in Regina, SK. He grew up in the US and attended schools in New York City, rural New Jersey, Vermont, and Iowa. The author of twelve books, including three novels, Margoshes has had his work published in numerous magazines and anthologies throughout North America, including six times in the Best Canadian Stories volumes. Margoshes worked as a newspaper reporter in the US and Canada, and has taught journalism and creative writing. He was writer-in-residence in Winnipeg and Saskatoon and has led creative writing workshops across Canada. His writing has won a number of awards, including the City of Regina Writing Award, the John V. Hicks Award for Fiction, and the Stephen Leacock Prize for Poetry.

Reviews

“As his tells of growing up in Winnipeg, joining the Communist Party, falling in and out and in of love, author Margoshes intersperses Zan’s spoken version with the history Zan knows is true, giving us a full-fledged character as tenacious and delightful as the novel itself…By the end, the book is exactly like Zan himself; alternately hilarious, charming, frustrating, and ultimately unforgettable.”, Publishers Weekly