Susanna has an incredible gift: she can heal ailments with just the touch of her hand. People travel from far and wide based on their faith in her abilities. But Susanna’s power only works in certain cases – it’s a semi-miracle. And as she grows into a woman, and tries to build a life of her own, her calling to fix and cure becomes more of a burden than a blessing. Why is she able to take people’s pain away sometimes, and not others? And not when she needs to most of all? With the balm of time, and the wisdom of experience, Susanna must learn to live with the mysterious nature of her miracle.
Available to readers for the first time since its initial publication, this is a wry and moving story by an American master.
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grown-ups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread and Vinegar Girl.
In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as ‘the greatest novelist writing in English’; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.
The first thing I tell people is, I’m just an ordinary woman. I’m just like you, I say. I can see they don’t believe me. They have all these preconceived notions. Maybe they expect me to be tall and blonde and beautiful, maybe in a long white robe or something of chiffon, loose and floating. The fact is that I am five foot two, a little overweight, my hair is gray. I generally wear a nice flowered dress and a string of pearls. When I am working out at the church I add an Orlon cardigan. The church is apt to be drafty, and I am subject to colds. Wouldn’t you call that ordinary? But nobody wants to hear me say it. I am just like any one of you, no different in any way, I tell them, standing in front of the pulpit instead of behind it and holding out my hands to show them. They only wait. They fix their eyes on mine. They have so many hopes of me, they can’t afford to think that I’m not special.
All my life my hands have been unusually wrinkled. Not every part of them (at least not when I was young), but just the finger joints, great folds and pouches at each knuckle as if my skin belonged to someone else, a very large man, for instance. I might have been wearing gloves that were too big for me. When I was a child I thought I would eventually grow into them. When I was a teenager I used to beg my daddy for all kinds of creams and salves and oils from his pharmacy. Every night I pinned my hopes on some magic potion. I sat at the window of the room that I shared with my sisters; I kneaded each finger separately and then all of them together while I gazed out into the dark, like a maiden in a fairy tale wringing her hands and waiting. I was seventeen at the time.
One Saturday in the spring of my seventeenth year I was tending my Aunt Eunice, my father’s spinster sister who lived with us. She was subject to migraines. My mother had asked me to help out because I had a way with sick people. (If times had been better, I would have liked to be a nurse.) I was folding a cold compress for her, working in the dim green light that shone through her drawn curtains, listening to her soft crying which sounded something like the flickering of a fire. It would break your heart