By Damian Tarnopolsky, Creative Lead, NBM Lab.

Toronto author Mike Barnes has published 12 books of poetry, short fiction, novels, and memoir. His book Be With: Letters to a Caregiver, honestly and empathically explored the fallout Alzheimer’s disease has on individuals and their loved ones, and was praised by Margaret Atwood as “timely, lyrical, tough, accurate.”

In Sleep is Now a Foreign Country, published by Biblioasis in November 2023,Barnes examines something which usually resists language: the psychotic break, an event he first experienced when he was twenty-two years old and backpacking through Europe.

While a diagnostic vocabulary has become more and more prevalent in discussions about mental health, Barnes takes an anti-pathologizing approach. Using highly original forms and language, he depicts his experiences as uncanny, and akin to extreme grief, insomnia, or near-death — human events that alter a person’s relationship to time and reality.

An illness memoir and much more, Sleep is Now a Foreign Country seeks to break down the barriers between those diagnosed with mental illness and the broader community. In Narrative-Based Medicine terms, it creates a new mode of storytelling to share experiences and to speak of matters of mental health holistically. As such, it provides revelatory guidance to how health practitioners can be with their patients.

Sleep is Now a Foreign Countrywas picked by CBC Books for their list of fall must-read Canadian nonfiction. Douglas Glover described it as “an amazing work — supremely intelligent, coolly self-analytical, eerie, melancholy, revelatory and terrifying,” while the Toronto Starsaid that “for all the ways Barnes’s book is indescribable, this much is true — it is a thing of beauty and courage.”

Sleep is Now a Foreign Countryis now available at bookstores or from the publisher as an e-book or paperback. More details from the publisher.