The Healer

Thirty-one stories, inspired by authentic narratives the author collected on his journeys to equatorial Africa, join fantasy and reality, dream and the everyday, magic and the mundane, life and death. Their exotic setting is above all a door into a world where anything is possible: changing bodies, crossing between sexes, ghosts, demons, life in a parallel world. It is normal there for death to sit in the corner of a bar waiting for its victim, for spirits to talk with the living, for the dead to be brought good palm wine, and for a dead father to wait a week for his eldest son. Among banana trees, palms, mud huts and manioc fields move healers, the nganga, sorcery-wielding women and quacks.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Short stories

Length

157 pages in the original

Genres

Speculative (assigned by AI)

First published

2006 by Koloman Kertész Bagala

Author's age

35 when first published

ISBN

8089129773 (original)

9781803091624 (Seagull Books, United Kingdom)