Mister Sandman: A Novel

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Steerforth Press, 2008 - Fiction - 268 pages
Barbara Gowdy’s outrageous, hilarious, disturbing, and compassionate novel is about the Canary family, their immoderate passions and eccentricities, and their secret lives and histories. The deepest secret of all is harbored in the silence of the youngest daughter, Joan, who doesn’t grow, who doesn’t speak, but who can play the piano like Mozart though she’s never had a lesson. Joan is a mystery, and in the novel’s stunning climax her family comes to understand that each of them is a mystery, as marvelous as Joan, as irreducible as the mystery of life itself. In its compassionate investigation of moral truths and its bold embrace of the fractured nature of every one of its characters,Mister Sandmanattains the heightened quality of a modern-day parable.

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Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
3
Section 3
14
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

Barbara Gowdy was born in Windsor in 1950 but grew up in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills, after having moved there with her family in 1954. After graduating from high school in the late 1960s, she studied at York University and the Royal Conservatory of Music. In the early 1980s, Gowdy became an editor for the publisher Lester and Orpen Dennys. She has also taught creative writing at Ryerson and the University of Toronto and has worked as an interviewer for the TVOntario program, Imprint. Gowdy has been a finalist for several prominent literary awards, including the Trillium Award for We So Seldom Look on Love and the Trillium Award, the Giller Prize, and the Governor General's Award for Mr. Sandman. The White Bone has also been nominated for the Giller Prize.

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