The Healer (Paperback, New ed)

'”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 the local newspapers and women's magazines over the past year. However, it soon becomes clear that the exposure of the "hick superstition story" is not the real reason for Wakelin's interest in Caroline. Devastated by his second wife's suicide, still carrying a bag of her clothes with him as a comforter to help him sleep, he is need of "healing" of his own . . . The book combines effectively suspenseful plot with a serious mediation 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 an a swift read despite the gravity of its tale.”
JamesUrquhart,
'The Guardian'

“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 first decapitated chipmunk [Hollingshead] reveals himself as a David Lynch of prose.”
Patrick Gale,
'Daily Telegraph'