Book description
A tale of mystery and healing from the Canadian forests, where Nature
can be nasty and men can easily go mad.
We're in the Canadian uplands, a landscape of lakes and forests, cabins
and canoes, hunters and hunted. The Healer is a young teenage girl with
a gift she finds hard to bear: she seems able to heal the sick, to drive
out foul spirits. Her father is a brutal man: strong, tempestuous and
violent, he finds it hard to accommodate his daughter's abilities in the
way she would wish. A journalist, our principal narrator, comes between
them, sent by his magazine to secure a story.
Entranced by the girl and the emptiness of the land, he buys from a
persuasive realtor the derelict lakeside cabin which becomes the centre
of the action, as all three main characters swirl into a vortex of
vengeance and violence - violence reflected in a landscape of storms and
floods of terrifying power. Hollingshead proves himself a writer who
knows the lethal force latent in the natural world. And that man is an
animal too. 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 Greg hollingshead is the author of one
previous novel, Spin Dry, and three sets of stories, Famous Players,
White Buick and The Roaring Girl. Only The Roaring Girl was published
outside Canada. He teaches at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
