My local library book club’s April book was Andrew Krivak’s The Bear, a 2020 novel I hadn’t heard of until it showed up on the docket. Now that I’ve read it, I want to go back and explore Krivak’s earlier work. If The Bear is anything to go by, I’ll love them.

Set sometime in the future after the collapse of civilizations, The Bear is a different kind of post-apocalyptic novel. It’s not about rebuilding or surviving in packs. It’s quiet, lonelier, and more elemental — closer to myth or fable. In fact, Krivak tells us right away in the opening sentence that there are only two humans left:

The last two were a girl and her father who lived along the old eastern range on the side of a mountain that stands alone. 

And he means it. Nowhere in this book is there a hidden village, no surprise return of society. This really is the end — and yet it never feels grim. Instead, it’s a deeply compassionate meditation on grief, legacy, and our place in a world that can — and will — go on without us.

The bond between father and daughter is tender and understated. They live in a rhythm that feels almost liturgical: hunting, walking, telling stories, remembering. They both know that when one of them is gone, it will mean not just a personal loss, but the end of the human story. And yet the novel never tips into despair. It becomes, surprisingly, a story about endurance — about how memory, love, and reverence might linger even after we’re gone.

About halfway through the book, everything I expected to happen had already happened, and I found myself wondering where it could possibly go. I won’t spoil what follows, but I will say it’s strange, graceful, and unexpectedly luminous. The second half transforms the novel into something even more expansive: a mediation on solitude, spirituality, and the quiet wisdom of the natural world.

Somehow, The Bear manages to be a story of the end — and it still feels like a beginning. As the final line suggests:

Then he set out, moving west along the shore, the sky beginning to pale behind him like the world itself being born.