FORTHCOMING FROM BRUCE HUNTER
Set in 1960s Calgary and Alberta's backcountry, this reissue of In the Bear’s House tells the story of a creative young mother, Clare Dunlop, raising her deaf son against the insurmountable odds of poverty, mental illness and hardship.
The novel opens as seventeen-year-old Clare gives birth to her son, while her husband serves a penitentiary sentence for a serious crime. After contracting pneumonia, her infant son loses his hearing.
Later, the young boy, nicknamed Trout, struggles to find his way until his 99-year-old auntie gives him a conch shell. For Trout, the conch becomes a literal and metaphorical hearing aid. He cannot hear the sea in the shell. Instead, he hears the mad sworl of the adult world around him full of contradictions and deceptions. Out of chaos, he finds clarity.
At the death of his beloved auntie, Trout spirals out of control, getting into serious trouble at school and at home. His mother, challenged with chronic depression and the impending birth of her fifth child, sends 12 year old Trout to live with her deaf uncle, Jack, in the wilderness of historic Kootenay Plains. There, Trout thrives, finding adventure, connection, and belonging, with his forest ranger great-uncle and his musician wife. Trout learns the wisdom of survival, listening and observing, from the elders of his own Scottish clan and those of the nearby Îyârhe Nakoda. He bears witness to land theft from First Nations to build the controversial and environmentally ruinous Bighorn Dam.
Despite its devastating sociological and ecological impact, the dam becomes Alberta’s largest reservoir and hydroelectric plant. Trout sees what others may not. Both the rugged beauty of the land, and especially its people, the destruction of their sacred places, homes and livelihoods. Disability becomes an unexpected gift of insight. In the Bear’s House is ultimately about listening to the wild and the wilderness, and what we lose when it’s gone.
PRAISE FOR IN THE BEAR'S HOUSE
“Bruce Hunter employs his impressive talents as a poet to craft perfectly honed images and details on every page of his novel In the Bear’s House, a coming-of-age story that follows a young deaf boy as he moves from mid-twentieth-century Calgary to an isolated ranger station in the Rocky Mountains. From describing Trout listening to his mother for the first time (“with his new hearing aid his name, in her voice, soft fur on it like the belly of his cat”) to contemplating ancient origins of the mountains that take hold of his imagination (“the wreckage of the Devonian seabed heaving thick plates of shale and limestone into the sky”), Hunter skillfully constructs a narrative that sustains deep engagement. This reissued novel from Frontenac House will captivate new readers and re-readers alike, who will be rewarded by being immersed in the realistic, yet emotionally and poetically heightened, world that Hunter has fashioned.” - David Martin, Limited Verse
“I love this book. I love the places in it - early Calgary and Kootenay Plains. I love the voices of the mother of a deaf child, with whom I identify, and of the child himself as he grows up. Bruce Hunter writes in a clear and beautiful style that feels effortless. A classic novel of the west and disability.” - Katherine Govier, The Three Sisters Bar & Hotel
In the Bear’s House is an enthralling novel of struggle, love and hope for the land that is home to both Indigenous and non-indigenous people. Bruce Hunter’s compassionate intelligence and stylistic prowess combine to put the reader directly in touch with fully fleshed characters in the rich and rocky territory of their lives and time. Set in working-class Calgary and the Kootenay Plains of west central Alberta, In the Bear’s House alternates between a mother’s story (voiced intimately in first person) and her deaf son’s tough coming-of-age story. Hunter captures the intricacies of gritty family life alongside a vivid portrait of the 1972 Bighorn dam project that gave no consideration to human and environmental costs. Acutely observed, deftly detailed and poignantly told, In the Bear’s House is a timeless tale of personal, social, and environmental urgencies. A deeply humane novel for the ages. - Elana Wolff, author of Faithfully Seeking Franz and Everybody Knows a Ghost
“Bruce Hunter drew heavily from his dreams, his own life experience and a substantial amount of research as he crafted the superbly written In the Bear’s House, a story that follows the lives of a deaf boy nicknamed Trout and his mother Clare. He wove fact and fiction together, telling a story that speaks of despair, loss, loneliness, but more importantly, discovery and redemption.
It is a coming-of-age story that blends the real and the imagined to such a high degree that separating fact from fiction is a challenge, as what appears to be real is in fact imagined, and vice versa. This effective blurring of the lines is a testament to the level of honesty and research Hunter, who, like his protagonist Trout, is deaf, employed as he wrote this 455-page novel.
And it is a combination that obviously works as Hunter received the Canadian Rockies award—beating out 101 entries from 10 countries—during the 2009 Banff Mountain Book Festival.” - Rob Alexander, for the Rocky Mountain Outlook, Canmore, Alberta.