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.