After five years buried like a mole amid the decaying maps and manuscripts of an historical institute, Lou is given a welcome field to catalogue a nineteenth-century library, improbably located in an octagonal house on a remote island in northern Ontario. Eager to reconstruct the estate’s curious history, she is unprepared for her discovery that the island has one other a bear.
Lou’s imagination is soon overtaken by the estate’s historical occupants, whose fascination with bear lore becomes her own. Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-discovery, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature through her bizarre and healing relationship with the bear.
A daring and compelling novel, Marian Engel’s Bear won the Governor General’s Award for 1976.