There is a modern essay to be written about this work. The bear of the title looms over her shoulders, a Muppet designed to be sexual, smiling inside the dark cavern of his face and presumably doing her from behind. Her tits are perfect, like two drawers of a card catalogue. I am talking about the notorious mass market paperback of Marian Engel’s 1976 masterpiece, where the body of a softcore librarian is completely laid open to us, surrounded by flowing silk. Includes a reading group guide.T he old cover was better. As provocative and powerful now as when it was first published. What she discovers will change her life forever. Irresistibly, Lou is led along a path of emotional and sexual self-awakening, as she explores the limits of her own animal nature. Lou's imagination is soon overtaken by the island's past occupants, whose deep fascination with bears gradually becomes her own. Eager to investigate the estate's curious history, she is shocked to discover that the island has one other inhabitant: a bear.

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. Lou is a lonely librarian who spends her days in the dusty archives of the Historical Institute. 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.

Bear novel cover marian engel