In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews award-winning author Bruce Hunter about his CanLit masterpiece, In the Bear's House (Frontenac House Press, 2025).

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.

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Bruce Hunter, "In the Bear's House" (Frontenac House, 2025)