Mister Sandman

(Paperback)

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Description

The Canary family are unlike any other. Joan is exquisite, tiny, mute, plays the piano like Mozart and lives in a closet. Marcy is a nymphomaniac, while Sonja earns a fortune clipping hair-grips to cardboard and knits compulsively. Their parents keep their own habits secret for as long as they can.

Reviews

"Count this wickedly funny and moving novel by a Canadian writer the year's sleeper. It's unlikely that anything else will come along that will equal its combination of audacious concept, inspired characterization, frank sexuality, ribald humor and poignant message... Gowdy's raucous, tender love is a find indeed."
"-- Publishers Weekly" (A Best Book of the Year)
""Mister Sandman" displays the same quirkiness, the same mordant sense of humor, the same ear for the vernacular, the same innocent-eyed acceptance of the bizarre, that characterizes her two previous novels...Gowdy surprises and delights; she also--which is rare--gives us the moments which are at the same time preposterous and strangely moving."
-- Margaret Atwood, "Times Literary Supplement" ("Best Books of the Year")
"One of the strangest--and most heartwarming--paeans to family ties you'll ever read. A+."
"-- Entertainment Weekly"
" The family at the center of "Mister Sandman" is uniquely, whimsically dysfunctional. But it is the unexpected birth of Joan Canary, half idiot savant and half changeling, that catalyzes the individual idiosyncrasies and personal secrets of the people around her, melding them into a clan defined by its eccentricity...Joan's possibly brain-damaged brilliance lies at the heart of both the narrative and the symbolism of this delightfully quirky novel, in which the Canary family's life emerges as a weird yet often affecting group composition.'"
"-- The New York Times Book Review"
"With Mister Sandman, Gowdy will surely join the ranks of Lorrie Moore, Kazuo Ishiguro and other great dark-humored literary beguilers. The novel is a true literary original, a perfectly pitchedcreation in which story, ideas and authorial voice merge so explosively, so felicitously that the reader feels compelled to exclaim 'Yes!' on almost every page."
"-- L.A. Weekly"
"There is an astonishing sensibility in Barbara Gowdy's "Mister Sandman," which bounds, spritelike, into the farthest corners of lunacy while staying tethered to the author's very real understanding of love."
--" Elle "(A Best Book of the Year)
"It's truly a monumentally entertaining, brilliantly constructed novel...Barbara Gowdy is poised to be the next big thing."
-- "Bloomsbury Review"

Author Bio

Barbara Gowdy is the award-winning author of a collection of short stories, We So Seldom Look on Love (the title story was filmed as Kissed), and three previous novels, the most recent of which is Mister Sandman, also published by Flamingo. She lives in Canada.