Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Feminist autofiction from one of Sweden’s blazing talents.
Blending autofiction and essay, The Bear Woman is a journey of feminism and literary
detective work spanning centuries and continents. In the 1540s, a young
French noblewoman, Marguerite de la Rocque, was abandoned on an island in
the Gulf of Saint Lawrence with her maidservant and her lover. In present-day Stockholm, an author and mother becomes captivated by the image of Marguerite
sheltered in a dark cave after her companions have died.
This image soon becomes an obsession. She must find out the real story of the woman she calls the Bear Woman. But so much in this history is written so as to gloss over male violence. And the maps and other sources she consults are at times undecipherable.
Karolina Ramqvist explores what it means to write history—and to live it.
“Karolina Ramqvist writes with frosty precision the kind of literature that is unforgettable. Her portraits of women hit deep into bone and marrow.” – Dorthe Nors, author of A Line in the World
“Ramqvist’s acute rendering of embodied sensual experience combined with her evocation of her double character’s increasingly desperate circumstances create a story of high tension, startling insights, and lasting resonance.” – Siri Hustvedt, author of Mothers, Fathers and Others
“One of my favorite discoveries from this year.” – Samanta Schweblin, author of Little Eyes
“Ramqvist is a serious contender for the Swedish literary limelight.” – Shelf Awareness
"The deeply personal journey of a writer, surprising and illuminating, and for me, familiar in the most reassuring way as she loses herself in this compelling story" – Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky
"Ramqvist skillfully blends a story of survival with an autofictional meditation on womanhood ... It adds up to a careful study of a woman’s writing life." –Publishers Weekly
"Ramqvist, in Vogel's translation, is a master of finely observed detail…Rarely have I found a book so gentle but enthralling in its telling, so able to distill the subtle turbulence of womanhood, motherhood, and the writer's life." – Jessica J. Lee, author of Two Trees Make a Forest
"Women’s stories often must be rescued from the margins of history, as a writer on a difficult research expedition is reminded in Karolina Ramqvist’s introspective novel The Bear Woman." –Foreword Reviews, Book of the Day
“Ramqvist is a serious contender for the Swedish literary limelight.” –Shelf Awareness
"A book about writing a book, which melds elements of autofiction, literary detective work, and adventure storytelling, The Bear Woman is a meditation on the value and pitfalls of writing history — especially women’s history." – Edmée Lepercq, Los Angeles Review of Books
"The Bear Woman is a reflection on the power at once wielded and yielded by storytellers." –Eloísa Díaz, Necessary Fiction
"Ramqvist’s excavation of the process of creation and research, delay and anxiety, is both multi-layered and intriguing." –James Scales, Full Stop
Karolina Ramqvist is one of the most influential writers and feminists of her generation in Sweden. She has written five novels to date and is widely celebrated for her powerful ability to provoke quiet yet fierce questions rather than provide loud and easy answers. In her skillful hands, contemporary issues of sexuality, commercialization, isolation, and belonging become highly charged and, at the same time, completely unaffected. In 2015 Ramqvist was awarded the prestigious P.O. Enquist Literary Prize for her novel The White City (Grove). The Bear Woman (2019) is her fifth and latest novel.