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.

Marian Engel was a Canadian novelist. Engel's best-known novel is Bear, and her other novels include No Clouds of Glory, The Honeyman Festival, The Glassy Sea, and Lunatic Villas. She won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction for Bear in 1976, and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1982. Marian Engel died in Toronto in 1985.

Marian Engel's profile page

Aritha van Herk teaches Creative Writing, Canadian Literature and Contemporary Narrative. Her novels include Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address (nominated for the Governor General's Award for fiction), Places Far From Ellesmere (a geografictione) and Restlessness. Her critical works, A Frozen Tongue (ficto-criticism) and In Visible Ink (crypto-frictions) stretch the boundaries of the essay and interrogate questions of reading and writing as aspects of narrative subversion. With Mavericks: an Incorrigible History of Alberta (winner of the Grant MacEwan Author's Award) van Herk ventured into new territory, transforming history into a narratological spectacle. That book frames the new permanent exhibition that opened at the Glenbow Museum in 2007. van Herk is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and is active in Canada's literary and cultural life, writing articles and reviews as well as creative work. She has served on many juries, including the Governor General's Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She is well known in the broader community of the city, the province, and the country as a writer and a public intellectual.

Aritha van Herk's profile page

“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

From the Hardcover edition.