The Healing

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
'An important American writer . . . The Healing examines precisely what its title announces: healing from silence, from physical attacks and treachery, from spiritual and cultural isolation, from the pain of old-fashioned, aching, bluesy love . . . It is also a very funny book' Valerie Sayers, New York Times
'Gayl Jones's work remains essential and vital; I will be rereading her catalogue for the rest of my life' Kima Jones, Nylon
Harlan Jane Eagleton is a faith healer, travelling to small towns, converting sceptics, restoring minds and bodies. But before that she was a rock star's manager, and before that a beautician. She's had a fling with her rock star's ex-husband and a rich African-German racehorse dealer; along the way she's somehow lost her own husband, a medical anthropologist now traveling with a medicine woman in 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.

Gayl Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University and has taught at Wellesley and the University of Michigan. Her books include Corregidora (1975), Eva's Man (1976), The Healing (1998), which was a National Book Award finalist, Palmares (2021), which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, and The Birdcatcher (2022), which was also a National Book Award Finalist.