Pearly Everlasting

Winner of the HarperCollins Canada-UBC Prize for Best New Fiction

In a narrative sown with rural folklore and superstition, Pearly Everlasting is an enchanting woodland Gothic about the triumph of good over evil and the forgotten beauty of the natural world.

New Brunswick, 1934. When a cook in a logging camp finds an orphaned baby bear, he brings it home to his wife, who names the cub Bruno and raises him alongside her newborn daughter, Pearly Everlasting.

During the Great Depression, amidst severe poverty and dangerous work conditions, Pearly’s family and the woodsmen form a close-knit community that embraces the tame, young bear in their camp.

But when a new camp supervisor—who increasingly endangers the lives of the loggers for profit—arrives, he is less accepting of Bruno. When the supervisor is found dead, Bruno is blamed, and soon after is kidnapped and sold to an animal trader. Pearly, now a teenager, has no choice but to find Bruno and sets off on a hazardous solo journey through the forest—her first trip to “the Outside”—to rescue him. 

To make her way home again, Pearly will have to tramp more than fifty miles through ice and snow, elude the malevolent spirit of Jack in the Dark and confront the modern-day cruelty of villagers fearful of her family’s way of life. Over those harrowing miles, Pearly will discover what it really means to be family to a bear.