Name: Bear
Rating: 3.34375 (16 reviews)
ISBN: 9781911547945

Marian Engel

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

Bear

A lonely woman journeys toward inner freedom and strengths and a sense of communion with all living creatures

Claustrophobic, sweaty and a touch devastating. Treats its salacious premise with a grown up’s nuance.  The eponymous bear’s indifference is really quite poggers.

pranya

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. From the Hardcover edition.

Patrick Book

What a curious little book! It says so much about loneliness, human interaction, projection, longing, and isolation in so very few pages. But it’s whole, despite its brevity.

Bear

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