NATIONAL BESTSELLER“Moyles is a precise, engaging, informative narrator who sweeps readers up in her vast world. The lessons that the bears teach her about herself, her brother and the value of human relationships are in turns heartwarming and heartbreaking. She seamlessly moves back and forth between natural and human habitats with elegant, understated prose, making her points with grace, logic and empathy. Black Bear is reminiscent of the very best nature writing, belonging on the shelf with Raising Hare, H Is for Hawk and Late Migrations.” —BookPage (starred review)“In this down-to-earth memoir, environmental journalist Moyles intertwines her experience losing a sibling to drug addiction with the story of how she learned to coexist with bears. . . . While Moyles made peace with the bears, she realized she could not save her brother, a grief she dealt with by immersing herself in nature and finding joy in seeing the bear families grow. Through keen observations and captivating storytelling, Moyles shows that survival is about finding inner peace and learning to overcome fears. This personal history goes straight to the heart.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)A dazzling memoir about one woman's coexistence with bears in the boreal forest and a singular meditation on sibling loss.When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father, a wildlife biologist known in Peace River as “the bear guy,” brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. This brief but unforgettable encounter spurred Trina’s lifelong fascination with Ursus americanus—the most populous bear on the northern landscape, often considered a nuisance to human society. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, she understood bears to be invisible entities: always present but mostly hidden and worthy of respect. Growing up during the oil boom of the 1990s, the threats in the siblings’ hard-drinking resource town were more human, dividing them from a natural reverence for the land, and eventually, from each other.After years of working for human rights organizations, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout, while her brother worked in the oil sands, vulnerable to a boom-and-bust economy and substance addiction. When she was assigned to a tower in a wildlife corridor, bears were alarmingly visible and plentiful, wandering metres away on the other side of an electrified fence surrounding the tower. Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear—a keystone species who is as subject to the environmental consequences of the oil economy as humans. At the same time, she searches for common ground with her brother on the land that bonded them.Impassioned and eloquent, Black Bear is a story of grief and a vision of peaceful coexistence in a divided world. It captures the fragility of our relationships with human and nonhuman species alike, and the imperative to protect the wild—along with the people we hold closest.
