Barbara Gowdy è l'autrice di sette acclamati libri, lodati per il loro stile unico e il loro approccio fresco alla narrazione. La sua opera è celebrata per le sue penetranti intuizioni sulla psiche umana e sul mondo che ci circonda. Gowdy è riconosciuta come una straordinaria realista letteraria che ha rifiutato con fermezza di aderire a tecniche e metodi narrativi logori. È una scrittrice miracolosa la cui voce distintiva affascina i lettori.
Se gli elefanti potessero raccontare una storia, sceglierebbero senz'altro quella di Mota, una giovane femmina d'elefante con il dono della preveggenza rimasta orfana alla nascita. Gli elefanti protagonisti di questa storia lottano per la sopravvivenza del branco e della specie guidati tanto da un olfatto straordinario quanto da visioni, ricordi e allucinazioni e il viaggio che intraprendono diviene un'odissea che mette alla prova la loro capacità di resistenza, il loro spirito di sacrificio.
The three Field sisters live in the sanitized suburbs of the fifties and sixties, but their plastic world is askew. They are growing up crazy in a very eccentric, often miserable, sometimes hilarious family. Their home is a war zone ruled by an abusive father - a philandering used-car salesman hooked on booze, guns and discipline. And whenever their mother's coffee mug is empty they hurry to refill it with whiskey, for they know she's living precariously in the wake of the strange unspeakable act she once committed against the family.These falling angels - tough-talking Lou; sensible, sentimental Norma; chic, naïve Sandy - go through rites of passage each in her own way. They turn to drugs, swinging sixties sex, schmaltzy fantasy - and, repeatedly, to one another. And, even after her death, they turn to their mother, and to the bizarre love they discover their father bore her, a love he must commemorate at Niagara Falls
From the internationally acclaimed author of The White Bone and The Romantic , a haunting and suspenseful novel of abduction and obsessive love Nine-year-old Rachel Fox has the face of an angel, a heart-stopping luminosity that strikes all who meet her. Her single mother, Celia, working at a video store by day and a piano bar by night, is not always around to shield her daughter from the attention--both benign and sinister--that her beauty draws. Attention from model agencies, for example, or from Ron, a small-appliance repairman who, having seen Rachel once, is driven to see her again and again.When a summer blackout plunges the city into darkness and confusion, Rachel is taken from her home. A full-scale search begins, but days pass with no solid clues, only a phone call Celia receives from a woman whose voice she has heard before but cannot place. And as Celia fights her terror and Rachel starts to trust in her abductor's kindness, the only other person who knows where she is wavers between loyalty to the captor and saving the child. Will Rachel be found before her abductor's urge to protect and cherish turns to something altogether less innocent?Tapping into the fear that lies just below the surface of contemporary city life, Barbara Gowdy draws on her trademark empathy and precision to create a portrait of love at its most consuming and ambiguous and to uncover the volatile point at which desire gives way to the unthinkable.
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 Sandman attains the heightened quality of a modern-day parable.
In this witty novel, award-winning Canadian writer Barbara Gowdy explores romance and the complexities of love through a narrative that delves into the nature of loving someone on the brink of oblivion.
Lakonische, präzise und zärtliche Erzählungen von ungewöhnlichen und faszinierenden Menschen, die von Geburt an anders sind, Berichte aus einer Welt, die trotz ihrer scheinbaren Fremdheit doch seltsam vertraut ist. Die dunkle Schönheit dieser Geschichten trifft mitten ins Herz. Mit diesem Buch gelang Barbara Gowdy in England der Durchbruch. „Das grenzt an literarische Hexerei.“ SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
Ein Gewitter nach dem anderen zieht sich in diesem heißen Sommer am Himmel zusammen und immer, wenn es ausbricht, verliert Rose Bowan das Bewusstsein und hat intensive, vollkommen realistische Träume, in denen sie im Körper einer anderen Frau ist. Sind das nur Träume? Oder »bewohnt« sie tatsächlich eine Fremde? Was geschieht ihr? So verstört wie fasziniert fängt sie an zu recherchieren, verlässt den Kokon des kleinen Programmkinos ihrer Familie und taucht in das aufgewühlte Leben von jemandem ein, der ganz anders ist als sie. Gleichzeitig erkrankt ihre Mutter an Demenz und fängt an – zum ersten Mal seit Jahrzehnten –, über eine andere gespenstische Präsenz zu sprechen: über Roses kleine Schwester. In Kleine Schwester erkundet Barbara Gowdy die erstaunliche Macht der Empathie, die Frage, wo wir aufhören und die anderen anfangen, und erzählt mit großer Eindringlichkeit von den tiefen familiären Bindungen, die uns prägen – ob wir wollen oder nicht.
