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Bear

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About this listen

The winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction,Marian Engel’s most famous – and most controversial – novel tells the unforgettable story of a woman transformed by a primal, erotic relationship. Lou is a lonely librarian who spends her days in the dusty archives of the Historical Institute. When an unusual field assignment comes her way, she jumps at the chance to travel to a remote island in northern Ontario, where she will spend the summer cataloguing a library that belonged to an eccentric nineteenth-century colonel. Eager to investigate the estate’s curious history, she is shocked to discover that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear. Lou’s imagination is soon overtaken by the island’s past occupants, whose deep fascination with bears gradually becomes her own. Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-awakening, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature. What she discovers will change her life forever. As provocative and powerful now as when it was first published. Includes a reading group guide.

 Animals Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction

Critic Reviews

“The best Canadian novel of all time. . . . Engel’s prose turns swiftly from the comic to lyric and back again. . . . In part for its extravagant strangeness, for the disruption it poses to [Canadian] tradition, Bear deserves to be celebrated.”
--National Post

“A strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance.”
--Margaret Atwood

“Canada’s Lolita or Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
--Globe and Mail

“Bear works as simply and mysteriously as a folktale. It is a remarkable tour de force.”
--New York Times

“A startlingly alive narrative of the forbidden, the unthinkable, the hardly imaginable.”
--Washington Post

“At once insightful and mysterious. . . . Bear is brave. We should be too.”
--Andrew Pyper

“It’s a modern Canadian fable . . . and, above all, totally readable.”
--Hazlitt Magazine

“An astounding novel, both earthy and mythical, which leads into the human self and also outward to suggest and celebrate the mystery of life itself.”
--Margaret Laurence, author of The Stone Angel

“A riveting story . . . brilliant and moving.”
– Publishers Weekly
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