Bear
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Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
Bear
Buy Now for £7.99
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Narrated by:
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Victoria Carr
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By:
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Marian Engel
About this listen
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 nineteenth-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 reading group guide.
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Critic reviews
--National Post
“A strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance.”
--Margaret Atwood
“Canada’s Lolita or Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
--Globe and Mail
“Bear works as simply and mysteriously as a folktale. It is a remarkable tour de force.”
--New York Times
“A startlingly alive narrative of the forbidden, the unthinkable, the hardly imaginable.”
--Washington Post
“At once insightful and mysterious. . . . Bear is brave. We should be too.”
--Andrew Pyper
“It’s a modern Canadian fable . . . and, above all, totally readable.”
--Hazlitt Magazine
“An astounding novel, both earthy and mythical, which leads into the human self and also outward to suggest and celebrate the mystery of life itself.”
--Margaret Laurence, author of The Stone Angel
“A riveting story . . . brilliant and moving.”
– Publishers Weekly
If you are expecting to hear about a woman and a bear having sex then you will be sorely disappointed. There is nothing sexual on the bear's part, he licks honey off her but that's it.
This might appeal to quite vanilla women for whom the subtlest idea of a tame bear's tongue briefly touching their intimate parts is a thrilling new idea, but there is nothing more here but that and the emotional connection she develops with him. the rest of the story is not very interesting.
Boring
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