<p>Gayl Jones's first novel <i>Corregidora</i> won her recognition as a writer whose work was gripping subtle and sure. It was praised along with her second novel <i>Eva's Man</i> by writers and critics from all over the nation: John Updike Maya Angelou John Edgar Wideman and James Baldwin to name a few. The publication of <i>The Healing</i> her first novel in over twenty years is a literary event.</p><p>Harlan Jane Eagleton is a faith healer traveling by bus to small towns converting skeptics restoring minds and bodies. But before that she was a minor rock star's manager and before that a beautician. She's had a fling with her rock star's ex-husband and an Afro-German horse 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.</p><p><i>The Healing</i> 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.</p>
