In the Bear’s House
by Bruce Hunter
So many different worlds emerge and converge in this lyrical, expansive novel from Bruce Hunter that we need two narrators: Trout, the deaf boy from Ogden, whose vivid imagination and wise pragmatism enhance and stimulate his unhearing world, and his young, artistic mother, Clare, a Scottish-Canadian lass from a rambunctious and sometimes unlucky but loving family of resilient pioneers at the cusp of old and new worlds in the Alberta of the early 1960s.
Calgary and its recent subdivision Ogden are glorious places for a childhood. Trout and his one friend, the tragic hero Kenny Dawes, roam the prairies with temerity, and revel in a young city poised for explosive growth. When one of their early adolescent adventures turns sour, Trout faces a looming downfall that could echo the past trajectory of his father, a good but flawed man who loves him deeply.
This is a new edition of the book previously published by Oolichan Books in 2009.
This book is scheduled for release in May 2025. It is now available for Pre-Order, and will be shipped as soon as we receive stock.
$24.95 CAD
Additional information
| Weight | .66 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 9 × 6 × .875 in |
| Page Count | 320 |
| Binding | Soft Cover |
| Year Published | 2025 |
Bruce Hunter
Bruce Hunter is a writer, editor, speaker, and mentor. In 2024, his novel, Nella casa dell’orso, was published in Italy by iQdB edizioni. In 2023, his poetry collection, Galestro, was published in Italy, following the release there in 2022 of A Life in Poetry, Poesie scelteda Two O’clock Creek, also by iQdB edizioni. 1n 2021, his memoir essay, “This is the Place I Come to in My Dreams” was shortlisted for the Alberta Magazine Publishers’ Awards. In 2024, his long poem “Dark Water” from Galestro won Gold for poetry for the Alberta Magazine Publishers’ Awards. And he is a proud new grandfather of Alice, Julian and Lucas.
Born in Calgary, Alberta, Bruce was deafened as an infant and afflicted with low vision much of his adult life. He grew up in the working-class neighbourhood of Ogden in the shadow of Esso’s Imperial Oil Refinery and now decommissioned Canadian Pacific Railway’s Ogden Shops. Calgary is located on Treaty Seven lands, in the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the îethka Nakoda Nations (Chiniki, Bearspaw, Goodstoney), the Otipemisiwak Métis Government (Districts 5 and 6).
In his early teens Bruce discovered writing, for there he could hear everything – and be heard. After high school, he worked for ten years as a labourer, equipment operator, Zamboni driver, and completed his technical education and apprenticeship as a gardener and arborist. In his late twenties, his published poetry won him a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts to study with novelist W.O. Mitchell and poet Irving Layton. From there he went onto York University to study film and literature and taught in the creative writing department before landing a position at Seneca College.
His poetry, fiction, reviews, interviews, and creative nonfiction have appeared in over 90 blogs, journals and anthologies internationally in Italy, Canada, China, India, Romania, the U.K. and the U.S.
Bruce has authored seven poetry books, as well as the best-selling CBC Radio-produced 1996 short story collection, Country Music Country (the third edition, the Reboot appeared in 2018).
In 2009, In the Bear’s House, won the Canadian Rockies Prize at the Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival. In 2010, his book Two O’clock Creek – poems new and selected, won the Acorn-Plantos Peoples’ Poetry Award for Canada.
Bruce was the 2017 Author in Residence for Calgary Public Library. His past residencies include the Banff Centre, Deaf and Hear Alberta, Richmond Hill Public Library, University of Toronto, Mount Royal University, and many others across Canada.
Bruce is an associate member of the Association of Italian Canadian Writers, a full member of the Canadian Authors Association, a life member of the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association (C.H.H.A.), and the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (C.N.I.B.), as well as long-time member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta. For more than three decades, Bruce has championed accessibility for those with vision and hearing loss.
Praise for In the Bear’s House
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 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