The Healing Audiobook By Gayl Jones cover art

The Healing

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The Healing

By: Gayl Jones
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
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National Book Award finalist follows a black faith healer whose shrewd observations about human nature are told with the rich lyricism of the oral storytelling tradition.

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. Harlan retraces her story to the beginning, when she once had a fling with the 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 draws us 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 of the black Southerner, Gayl Jones weaves her story to its dramatic - and unexpected - beginning.

©2018 Gayl Jones (P)2018 Beacon Press African American Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Marriage Witty

Critic reviews

"Gayl Jones's special gift is to shape experience and make it seem unshaped." (John Alfred Avant, The New Republic)

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Enjoyed the story and how Ms. Jones chose to tell it. The narrator does an excellent job.

Another Jones Gem

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Disjointed but perfectly postmodern, the story takes place from end to the beginning to explain how the main character, Harlen , becomes a healer. Her travels through the United States and east Africa are insightful and entertaining. It is possible that much of the novel is autobiographical as Jones spent years in exile with her husband who committed suicide when they returned to the US. He suffered from mental issues like the woman who tries to kill Harlen in the novel, perhaps. There are some striking similarities.

Strange but brilliant!

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