Description: Barbara Gowdy, who has been compared to a writer's version of Jane Campion and Diane Arbus, as well as to John Irving, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood, has created an undeniably strange and entirely brilliant tale that will stay with the reader for a long time to come. Gowdy's outrageous, hilarious, disturbing, and compassionate novel is about the Canary family, their immoderate passions and eccentricities, and their secret lives. Set in Toronto in the mid-1950s, this story has a cast of characters like no other: Gordon, the myopic book editor, is in love with a tall red-headed guy, though he is married to Doris, who flirts with the Avon lady and raises their teenage daughter's baby as her own. Baby Joan, dropped on her head at birth, will grow into a tiny, mute savant who never leaves her closet until using her Mozartian musical genius, she brings the bizarre Canary family secrets out into the open in a remarkable finish that will leave the reader reeling.

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