Mister Sandman: A Novel - Hardcover

This riotous account of "the family unit" was a smash hit in Europe, Canada, and England. In the Times Literary Supplement, author Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale) praised Barbara Gowdy's novel as surprising and delightful, containing moments "at the same time preposterous and strangely moving." The Canary family guards many secrets, including the mystery of tiny daughter, Joan, who was dropped on her head at birth and has never spoken. Joan plays the piano like Mozart, yet has never had a lesson. The outrageous hilarity rises into a climax that creates a stunning new definition of family togetherness.

Barbara Gowdy CM (born 25 June 1950) is a Canadian novelist and short story writer. Born in Windsor, Ontario, she is the long-time partner of poet Christopher Dewdney and resides in Toronto.

Gowdy's novel Falling Angels (1989) was made into a film by director Scott Smith, from an adaptation written by Esta Spalding, in 2002. The novel focuses on a nuclear family in a 1960s Ontario suburb. The main characters are three sisters who come of age in a house run by their abusive and womanizing father and must constantly find ways to take care of their depressed and alcoholic mother. Gowdy says her inspiration for the book was the idea of a Canadian family living during the Cold War and practicing using their bomb shelter in the back yard. In the novel and movie, the family spend two weeks trapped in the bomb shelter as an "exercise" rather than going on a family trip to Disneyland.

Authors such as Alice Munro and Carol Shields look at the everyday, but the bulk of Gowdy's work reflects upon the opposite. Gowdy's stories look at the extreme, the strange and the abnormal, but she is able to make her characters relatable and poignant. She often uses magic realism as a writing style, combining the fantastic or unusual with realistic and believable descriptions, placing her within the tradition of Southern Ontario Gothic.

The narrator and main character of the title short story of her 1992 collection, We So Seldom Look On Love, for instance, is an assistant embalmer at a funeral home who makes love to the bodies of attractive young men before they are buried. The story was the inspiration for the 1996 Canadian independent film Kissed, directed by Lynne Stopkewich and starring Molly Parker. The story is based on Frank O'Hara's poem "Ode to Necrophilia", and was inspired by a newspaper article Gowdy read about a young California woman who hijacked a hearse on its way to a funeral, took the corpse of the young man inside the coffin to a motel room and made love to it for several days before being caught by the police. We So Seldom Look On Love is meant as a compilation of circus-type characters and their quest to find connection with others. Another story features a two-headed man who removes one of his heads. A third story in that collection, "93 Million Miles Away" involves a woman who masturbates and exposes herself through the window of her apartment to a man in his apartment across the street. This story was made into the film Arousal.

Similarly, her novel Mister Sandman revolves around the family of Joan, a young autistic girl with a savant talent for playing classical music on the piano, and her novel The White Bone is written from the perspective of an elephant.

Yet her work is not about the shock value, but finding what is universal in us, as readers, to each of her characters.

Gowdy was nominated for a Governor General's Award for her novels Mister Sandman (1995), White Bone (1998), and Helpless (2007). White Bone was also nominated for the Giller Prize. The Romantic (2003), a best-seller in Canada, was nominated for several awards, including the Man Booker Prize. It was a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. "Helpless" (2007) won the Trillium Award.

She was appointed a member of the Order of Canada effective 5 October 2006.