Publisher's Synopsis
From the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing follows Harlan Jane Eagleton as she travels to small towns, converting skeptics, restoring minds and healing bodies. But before she found her calling, Harlan had been a minor rock star's manager, and before that, a beautician. To understand her journey, the novel returns to the beginning of Harlan's story, when she once had a fling with her rock star's ex-husband and found herself infatuated with an Afro-German horse dealer; along the way she's somehow lost her own husband, a medical anthropologist now traveling with a medicine woman across eastern Africa. Harlan tells her story from the end backwards, drawing us constantly deeper into her world and the mystery at the heart of her tale: the story of her first healing. The Healing is a lyrical and at times humorous exploration of the struggle to let go of pain, anger, and even love. Slipping seamlessly back through Harlan's memories in a language rich with the textured cadences unfiltered dialogue, Gayl Jones weaves her story to its dramatic-and unexpected-beginning.
