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Bear
- Narrated by: Victoria Carr
- Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins
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Bear
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Publisher's Summary
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 19th-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 book group guide.
Critic Reviews
“A strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance.” (Margaret Atwood)
“A startlingly alive narrative of the forbidden, the unthinkable, the hardly imaginable.” (Washington Post)
“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)