The Healer - Softcover

Hollingshead, Greg

2.89

65 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060929677 ISBN 13: 9780060929671

Publisher: Perennial, 2000

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When recently widowed journalist Tim Wakelin heads north in search of a story about a local healer named Caroline Troyer, he enters a world that is real yet strange. Familiar landmarks disappear and extraordinary events unfold as his life becomes intertwined with hers. Even the landscape itself--the ancient rocks, myriad lakes, and cathedral forests of the Canadian Shield--becomes a source of threat. How can he understand this strange and beautiful woman when he is no longer sure why he has really come or what is happening to him? And Caroline, who is aware that her ability to heal is only part of a mysterious process of transformation that she is undergoing, must break free of the chains of her abusive family. Perhaps Tim can provide the sanctuary she needs, if he has the strength to survive the violent forces unleashed by his arrival. Darkly beautiful, illuminated by flashes of wit and great lyricism, written in a compelling cadence all its own, The Healer is a work of immense power and original sensibility.

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Review:

From the reviews for The Healer:

‘A mad-tongued Gothic tale, a blend of high drama and sly, dark marvels’
New York Times

‘There are some wonderfully poetic and resonant images in this novel; the descriptions of the Canadian landscape are incandescent and some of the set-pieces both hilarious and disturbing.’
Francis Gilbert, The Times

From the Publisher:

�A blend of high drama and sly, dark marvels' New York Times
‘The Healer, Greg Hollingshead’s second novel, begins with Tim Wakelin, a freelance writer, visiting a small mining town in the Canadian Shield in order to follow up a story about a local woman whose reputed healing powers have received attention in newspapers and women’s magazines over the past year. However, it soon becomes clear that the exposure of a "hick superstition story" is not the real reason for Wakelin’s interest in Caroline. Devastated by his wife’s suicide, still carrying a bag of her underclothes with him as a comforter to help him sleep, he is in need of "healing" of his own... The book combines an effectively suspenseful plot with a serious meditation on the dark side of love. The Healer is an accomplished novel which gives full rein to an imagination that moves equally freely in the realms of the bizarre and the everyday, asserting the covert connections between the two.’ Julian Ferraro, TLS

‘Hollingshead does not burden The Healer with solutions but allows the unfathomable impulses of love and hurt to enmesh these fractured and dislocated lives. He writes with a governing absence of philosophy that vividly recalls the nihilisms of Cormac McCarthy. There are resonances of E.Annie Proulx, too, in his poetically compressed prose that imagines stark landscapes as richly unyielding as their beleaguered inhabitants. This is a substantial book and a swift read despite the gravity of its tale. Hollingshead’s unhysterical comprehension of the human capacity for harm is convincing and unsettling; such raw exposure of emotion lends an edge of agoraphobia to his isolated, northern community.’ James Urquhart, Guardian

‘From the first decapitated chipmunk [Hollingshead] reveals himself as a David Lynch of prose. Once the characters are pursuing one another through a vast expanse of Canadian woodland, Hollingshead piles on the menace... Excellent fodder for that remote camping holiday.’ Patrick Gale, Daily Telegraph

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