The Polar Bear Son

A lonely old woman adopts, cares for, and raises a polar bear as if he were her own son, until jealous villagers threaten the bear's life, forcing him to leave his home and his "mother," in a retelling of a traditional Inuit folktale.

An old Eskimo woman adopts an orphan polar bear that provides food for her as it grows up.

In the second collaboration of the mother-and-son team that created Mothers Are Like That, two cubs are born to a polar bear. Mother bear teaches her cubs how to swim and hunt seals. But when the ice melts earlier than usual—the result of a changing climate—there is not enough food to keep her milk rich or to feed her cubs. Emboldened by hunger, the bears venture into human territory, where they are captured and caged in a special jail for bears until winter returns and the ice forms once more. Then the bears are released to hunt again on the shifting floes of the Arctic. This lyrical story of a mother and her babies is beautifully illustrated and based on fact. It includes a detailed afterword on the effects of global warming on polar bears.

A little polar bear becomes very lonely when the snow animals meant to keep him company melt away. This touching story features illustrations dusted with glittering foil snowflakes. Full color.

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear stars three generations of talented writers and performers—who happen to be polar bears The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as “Yoko Tawada’s magnificent strangeness”—Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son—the last of their line—is Knut, born in chapter three in a Leipzig zoo but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away... Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and “the intimacy of being alone with my pen.”

The Little Polar Bear—now available as a paperback! It's a big day for the little polar bear Lars! His father takes him hunting for the very first time, and that night he is so tired from all his lessons that he falls fast asleep. He sleeps so soundly that he doesn't hear the ice crack, doesn't feel himself slowly drift away from his father and the North Pole - he doesn't realize that his adventures have just begun.

Abandoned on the sea ice by a group of cruel hunters, an orphan is adopted by a polar bear elder. While living in the bear's village, the orphan learns many lessons about survival and his own place in the world. This traditional tale is retold by Inuit storyteller Qaunaq. Full color.