The Summer of the Bear

With her fifth novel, critically acclaimed writer and journalist Bella Pollen takes readers into the private dynamics of a family grappling with the loss of father and husband in Scotland s Outer Hebrides, where between elemental beauty and utter bleakness, strange forces are at play. In 1980 Germany, under Cold War tension, a mole is suspected in the British Embassy. When the clever diplomat Nicky Fleming dies suddenly and suspiciously, it s convenient to brand him the traitor. But was his death an accident, murder, or suicide? As the government digs into Nicky s history, his wife, Letty, relocates with her three children to a remote Scottish island hoping to salvage their family. But the isolated shores of her childhood retreat only intensify their distance, and it is Letty s brilliant and peculiar youngest child, Jamie, who alone holds on to the one thing he s sure of: his father has promised to return and he was a man who never broke a promise. Exploring the island, Jamie and his teenaged sisters discover that a domesticated brown bear has been marooned on shore, hiding somewhere among the seaside caves. Jamie feels that the bear may have a strange connection to his father, and as he seeks the truth, his father s story surfaces unexpected ways. Bella Pollen has an uncanny ability to capture the unnoticeable moments in which families grow quiet. A novel about the corrosive effects of secrets and the extraordinary imagination of youth, "The Summer of the Bear" is Pollen s most ambitious and affecting book yet. "