A Game of You

Barbie, a minor character from The Doll's House, is recently divorced, adrift, and living in a New York apartment building among neighbours as unusual as she is. She no longer dreams. Then Martin Tenbones, a creature from the childhood dreamland she called the Land, arrives with a quartz amulet and a warning: the Cuckoo has taken over her old kingdom, and only she can go back and face it.

Collecting The Sandman issues 32 to 37, the fifth volume sets a quest through a fantasy realm against the everyday lives of the people in Barbie's building, including her friend Wanda, the couple Hazel and Foxglove, and the witch Thessaly. Dream of the Endless appears at the edges of the story.

Written by Neil Gaiman and drawn mainly by Shawn McManus, with chapters by Colleen Doran, Bryan Talbot, Dick Giordano and George Pratt, it is a quieter, more intimate book than the volumes around it, about identity, friendship and what a person owes the stories they grew up with. Originally published by DC Comics under its Vertigo imprint in 1993.