![]() It would be reductive to construe this as a simple reimagining of Gowdy’s own bodily estrangement, not least because her writing is not that calculated (“I’m usually only half a sentence ahead of myself,” she claims). It is the story of a woman who finds herself, via an apparent glitch in the fabric of reality, inhabiting the body of a stranger. Little Sister takes the inventiveness of its predecessors and ups the ante. André Alexis, the winner of the 2015 Giller, calls her “the best writer of sentences of my generation.” She has earned this reputation in part for her work as an experimenter across her eight works of fiction, she has imagined herself into the bodies and minds of everything from an idiot-savant child to a conflicted pedophile to a tribe of African elephants. She has been nominated for every major fiction award in the country, appearing twice on the Giller Prize short list. ![]() The release of any book by Barbara Gowdy qualifies as a literary event. It’s no wonder that her new novel, Little Sister, took a decade to complete. “It came on mysteriously one day,” she says, “when I was obliged to stand for several hours.” After numerous MRIs and X-rays and experiments with everything from ozone injections to the hallucinogen ayahuasca, she is still no closer to a diagnosis or remedy than she was fourteen years ago. ![]() Since 2003, the author has suffered from chronic, debilitating pain in her lower back. ![]()
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