For readers of Rachel Cusk, Lisa Taddeo and the essays of Zadie Smith, Bear Woman is a beautifully wrought memoir from one of Sweden's bestselling authors, in which she examines motherhood and the female experience.

In 1541, a young woman named Marguerite de La Roque accompanied her guardian on one of the first French colonial expeditions to the new world. After a sexual scandal on board ship, she was punished with abandonment on a barren, uninhabited island in the North Atlantic.

Centuries later, Swedish writer Karolina Ramqvist came across the legend of the Bear Woman and became obsessed with this woman's story of survival against the odds. Through an interwoven account of Marguerite de La Roque's fierce struggles and eventual escape from the island, where she bore a child, and the author's own life of solitude as a writer and a mother of three, Bear Woman is an exploration of the meaning of motherhood and life as a woman, both then and now.