A tale of mystery and healing from the Canadian forests, where Nature can be nasty and men can easily go mad. * The force of William Faulkner combines with Michael Ondaatje's giddying lyricism in this devastating novel from Canada. * 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 a derelict fisherman's lakeside cabin, which is utterly inaccessible in the midst of a vast forest, in which he -- and others -- lose their tracks. The cabin becomes the centre of the action, and 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.