About the Author

Barbara Gowdy is the author of seven books, including Helpless, The Romantic, The White Bone, Mister Sandman, We So Seldom Look on Love and Falling Angels, all of which have been met with widespread international acclaim and critical praise. She has been a finalist three times for the Governor General's Award and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, twice for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. In 1996 she received the Marian Engel Award, and in 2008 the Trillium Book Award. Barbara Gowdy is a Member of the Order of Canada and a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Toronto.

Reviews

Disenchanted eccentrics wending their way through eerie situations seem to be the dominant theme in most of the postmodern ``new fiction.'' Troublesome as these forays into nihilism's gloomy landscapes are, an effective work of new fiction is as bracing as a dive into a chilly pond, offering more than a few surprises with its odd meld of quirky characters and wickedly audacious scenes. Gowdy's is one such dark gem of a novel. Through a series of vignettes it charts the lives of the Field family, recounting bouts of alcoholism, neglect, and verbal abuse. A story otherwise laden with sad escapades, Fallen Angels remains lively throughout because of the inventiveness and strength of its main characters: Lou, Norma, and Sandy. These three unfortunate sisters will amaze readers with their ability to endure the many traumas of childhood and adolescence, despite the antics of their even more unfortunate parents. This coming-of-age novel is not likely to appeal to those who wear a shield of optimism.--Lauren Bielski,``Printing News''

Canadian writer Gowdy's ( Through the Green Valley ) second novel offers many satisfactions. Scrupulously and evocatively wrought, with fully formed characters, it poses but does not quite resolve an intriguing mystery rooted in character and fate. The book opens in 1969, at a funeral of a woman who either jumped or fell from the roof of her track house. The time frame then shifts to a decade earlier, when the woman's daughters discover that years before she had thrown or dropped an infant son over Niagara Falls. The girls--Norma, Lou and Sandy--are fascinated by this unknown sibling and by a parent who spends her life drunk, facing a TV, while the girls' father, a used-car salesman, maintains household order, such as it is. One Christmas, he promises a trip to Disneyland but instead builds, with Norma's help, a bomb shelter, and persuades the family to hole up in it for two weeks. The girls get through the fetid underground days by sipping from their mother's mug of whiskey, which their father keeps topped off. Through it all, the siblings create their own mechanisms for coping. Originally published in Canada to critical acclaim, this novel, a portion of which appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1989 , brilliantly celebrates the bonding that occurs even in dysfunctional families. (Apr.)