Bear

Bear, Marian Engel's Governor General's Award-winning novel, follows Lou, a solitary archivist sent to a remote island in northern Ontario to catalogue the library and estate of a deceased colonel.

Isolated in the wilderness, she finds herself sharing the house with a tame bear left behind on the property, and over the course of a summer develops an increasingly intense, unconventional bond with the animal.

As she cares for the bear, Lou is drawn out of her guarded, buttoned-up city existence and into a raw confrontation with her own longing for freedom, connection and physical life.

Spare, strange and frequently unsettling, the novel is regarded as a landmark of Canadian literature for its unflinching exploration of solitude and desire.