Pearly Everlasting

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

Steeped in rural folklore and superstition, and full of remarkable characters, Pearly Everlasting is an enchanting woodland Gothic about the triumph of good over evil, the beauty of the natural world, and a bond of love that cannot be broken.

New Brunswick, 1934: A cook in a logging camp rescues an orphaned baby bear and brings it home to his wife. She names the cub Bruno and raises him alongside their newborn daughter, Pearly Everlasting.

Living in the forest amid severe poverty during the Great Depression, Pearly’s family and the lumberjacks form a close-knit commu­nity that accepts and embraces the tame young bear in their camp. But when a new camp supervisor—a profiteer who endangers the lives of the loggers—arrives, he is less accepting of Bruno.

When the supervisor is later found dead, Bruno is blamed, and then kidnapped and sold to an animal trader. Determined to rescue the only brother she has ever known, Pearly, now a teenager, sets off on a hazardous solo journey—her first trip to the Outside—to find him.

To make her way home again, Pearly will tramp through miles of ice and snow, elude malevolent spirits, and confront the cruelty of local villagers. But over the course of her harrowing journey, she will also discover new worlds, the kindness of strangers, and a strength she never knew she possessed.