4.0
How to Survive a Bear Attack
ByPublisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE 2025 GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD FOR NON-FICTION • Named a Best Book of 2025 by The Globe and Mail • CBC • Spotify • The Hill Times
In this debut memoir from the bestselling author of The Bear and The Last Neanderthal, Claire Cameron confronts the rare genetic mutation that gave her cancer by investigating an equally rare and terrifying event—a predatory bear attack.
When Claire Cameron was nine years old, her father, a professor of Old English, told her he was dying. In the years after he was gone, she found a way to overcome her grief among the rivers and lakes of Algonquin Park, a vast Canadian wilderness area. Around that same time, in 1991, a couple was killed by a black bear in a rare predatory attack in the park. Claire was shocked and, never fully sure of what happened, the attack haunted her.
Now older, with children of her own, Cameron was diagnosed with the same kind of deadly skin cancer as her father. Caught in a second wave of grief, she was told by her doctor, “the ideal exposure to UV light is none.” No longer able to venture into the wilderness as she once had, with long scars on her back, she became obsessed with the bear attack in Algonquin Park again. How could terror rip through such a beautiful place? Could she separate truth from fiction? She headed north to investigate.
Seamlessly weaving together nature writing with true crime investigation in this unflinching account of recovery, How to Survive a Bear Attack is at once an intimate portrait of an extraordinary animal, a bracing chronicle of pain, obsession, and love, and a profoundly moving exploration of how we can understand and survive the wildness that lives inside us.
In this debut memoir from the bestselling author of The Bear and The Last Neanderthal, Claire Cameron confronts the rare genetic mutation that gave her cancer by investigating an equally rare and terrifying event—a predatory bear attack.
When Claire Cameron was nine years old, her father, a professor of Old English, told her he was dying. In the years after he was gone, she found a way to overcome her grief among the rivers and lakes of Algonquin Park, a vast Canadian wilderness area. Around that same time, in 1991, a couple was killed by a black bear in a rare predatory attack in the park. Claire was shocked and, never fully sure of what happened, the attack haunted her.
Now older, with children of her own, Cameron was diagnosed with the same kind of deadly skin cancer as her father. Caught in a second wave of grief, she was told by her doctor, “the ideal exposure to UV light is none.” No longer able to venture into the wilderness as she once had, with long scars on her back, she became obsessed with the bear attack in Algonquin Park again. How could terror rip through such a beautiful place? Could she separate truth from fiction? She headed north to investigate.
Seamlessly weaving together nature writing with true crime investigation in this unflinching account of recovery, How to Survive a Bear Attack is at once an intimate portrait of an extraordinary animal, a bracing chronicle of pain, obsession, and love, and a profoundly moving exploration of how we can understand and survive the wildness that lives inside us.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesHow to Survive a Bear Attack Reviews
4.0
“I have mixed feelings about this book. Really enjoyed the beginning as the author discusses how she dealt with her grief in the outdoors. There were times where I felt the author was repetitive and we were getting irrelevant information. I also didn’t love the aspect of what the bears life was like leading up to the attack or how much the author just pulled other people’s stories in. It felt almost awkward at times.
Overall though it was an enjoyable read and gave me a perspective on dealing with anticipating grief that I hadn’t thought of before. I also just love that it’s set in Algonquin and Northern Ontario. Her love of nature and parks is super relatable and clear through her writing.”
About Claire Cameron
CLAIRE CAMERON's most recent novel, The Last Neanderthal, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. It sold in eleven territories. Her second novel, The Bear, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, sold in ten territories, and was a #1 national bestseller. It won the Northern Lit Award from the Ontario Library Service, which her first novel, The Line Painter, also won. Claire has led canoe trips in Algonquin Park and worked as an instructor for Outward Bound, teaching mountaineering, climbing, and whitewater rafting in Oregon and beyond. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and she is a monthly contributor to The Globe and Mail. She lives in Toronto.
Other books by Claire Cameron
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