“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
 
“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