The Girl Who Speaks Bear

Found abandoned in a bear cave as a baby, 12-year-old Yanka has always felt out of place in her small village. When she wakes up to find that her legs have become bear legs, she sets off into the forest to discover who she is, on a journey that takes her from icy rivers to smouldering mountains, with an ever-growing group of misfits alongside her...

Sophie Anderson was born in Swansea, and now lives in the Lake District with her family. Her writing is most often inspired by folk and fairy stories, especially the Slavic tales her Prussian grandmother told her when she was young. Across her bestselling novels, Sophie has won the Independent Bookshop Book of the Year Award and the Wales Book of the Year Award, and been shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal twice, the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award, the British Book Awards' Children's Fiction Book of the Year, the Andersen Prize, and the Branford Boase Award. Sophie's books have been translated into over twenty-five languages, and The House with Chicken Legs has been adapted for stage by Les Enfants Terribles.