By turns funny, savage, poetic and heartbreaking, Safety in Bear Country follows Serena, a recent graduate from art school who thought she'd have it all figured out and be making a comfortable living as an artist, but instead finds herself dumped by her boyfriend and back in her parents' basement in the backwater town she couldn't wait to leave. The year is 1994: miserable and lost in the dark forest of her early twenties, Serena takes a job with her small town's main employer, an institution for people with developmental disabilities. When one of the residents dies in her care, Serena flees the trauma, ultimately embarking on a journey that pushes and pulls her between constraint and freedom, despair and hope. Set in small-town Ontario, Australia, northern British Columbia and Miami, Safety in Bear Country pulls the reader with gorgeous and inventive prose though a world of inequity, spirituality, activism and psychedelics as Serena labours to make sense of her place in the world.

Safety in Bear Country is Heather Paul's first novel. She has a Master of Arts in Literature from Memorial University St. John's NL. Heather has worked as a canoe and kayak trip leader, a yoga instructor, a high school art teacher, at a men's prison, group homes, and at a women's shelter. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including The Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, The Nashwaak Review, and The Newfoundland Quarterly. She lives in Barrie, Ontario.

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