Engel, Marian. Bear (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 2002, c1976) 121 p.

An aging librarian works in a Canadian historical institute.

Yet, when the weather turned and the sun filtered into even her basement windows, when the sunbeams were laden with spring dust and the old tin ashtrays began to stink of a winter of nicotine and contemplation, the flaws in her plodding private world were made public, even to her, for although she loved old shabby things, things that had already been loved and suffered, objects with a past, when she saw that her arms were slug-pale and her fingerprints grained with old, old ink, that the detritus with which she bedizened her bulletin boards was curled and valueless, when she found that her eyes would no longer focus in the light, she was always ashamed, for the image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different from this, and she suffered in contrast. (p. 2).

But when she is sent to an island in northern Ontario to catalog a private library left to the institute she finds a strange new life.